The Queerest Podcast
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The Queerest Podcast is your cosmic guide to the Queer Universe. Hosted by Andraé BVR, each episode takes you on an interstellar journey through queer culture, identity, and influence. From dismantling media tropes to exploring queer representation, we invite you to challenge norms and expand your horizons. So, buckle up, set your phasers to fabulous—close encounters of the queerest kind await!
The Queerest Podcast
WHY CAN'T SHE LIVE?: The Tragic Trope of Queer Women in Media
Why do queer women in media often meet tragic ends, and what does this mean for representation?
In Why Can’t She Live? The Tragic Trope of Queer Women in Media, host Andraé BVR and Dr. Nicole Rizzuto explore the cultural and psychological impact of the Dead Lesbian Syndrome trope. Together, they examine its roots, its effects on LGBTQ+ audiences, and the movement for better representation. This episode is a powerful call to action for authentic and empowering portrayals.
You have women who like, hook up with this one girl for six months, they break up and then a week later they're hooking up with another girl for six months, getting drunk, having sex, staying together like moving in together, living together for six months, breaking up, getting drunk, having sex and repeating that cycle. And a lot of that comes from the fact that, like they don't believe they get a happy ending. You've had all these stories tell you there is no happy ending for you. You have institutes like the Geena Davis Institute with the tagline if they can see it, they can be it. If all queer girls are seeing is death, insanity and unhappiness, then they conclude that the answer is death, insanity or unhappiness.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Queerest Podcast, your cosmic guide to the queer universe. Hosted by Andre BVR, each episode takes you on an interstellar journey through queer culture, identity and influence. From dismantling media tropes to exploring queer representation. We invite you to challenge norms and expand your horizons. So buckle up and set your phasers to fabulous Close encounters of the queerest kind await.
Speaker 3:Greetings, cosmic queers and allies. Welcome to the Queerest Podcast. I'm your host, andre BVR, and I am thrilled to have you here as we set course on another vibrant corner of the queer cosmos. Today we're diving into a vital and often overlooked topic the persistent trope of dead lesbian syndrome in media. This tragic narrative has haunted queer women's representation for decades, shaping perceptions of our identities in profound and damaging ways. Joining us to unpack this heavy but essential subject is Dr Nicole Rizzuto, a historian, educator and advocate with a deep passion for queer representation.
Speaker 3:Dr Rizzuto is this bisexual, cisgender woman living in Chicago with her girlfriend and rescue pets. Armed with a PhD in history and culture from Drew University, she is a powerful voice in the LGBTQ plus community, currently serving as the development manager of engagement and advancement at the Point Foundation, the nation's largest LGBTQ plus scholarship organization. Dr Rizzuto's expertise bridges queer history, media analysis and activism. She's also inspiring the next generation of change makers as an educator at St Xavier University, where she teaches women's studies and queer history. When she's not championing LGBTQ plus causes, you'll find her reading sapphic fiction, cheering for the White Sox or volunteering in her South Side Chicago community. Dr Rizzuto, welcome. It's an absolute honor to have you today to discuss, as I'm excited to dive into your work and explore the origins and impact of dead lesbian syndrome and discuss how we can find a future filled with more inclusive and empowered queer narratives. Hello, hello.
Speaker 1:Hi, you make me sound so much better than the bio that I wrote.
Speaker 3:You are so much better. You're amazing, get out of here. Awesome. All right, so let's get started. I want to first talk about kind of the research and dissertation focus. By the way, it is over 400 page dissertation for those that are curious like amazingly detailed. So I want to start off by saying that. But I want to kind of go back to like the inception of this, like what inspired your focus on dead lesbian syndrome and how did your personal or academic background kind of shaped the research?
Speaker 1:So when I was 10, they killed Zena and I was bereft. I was bereft at the death of Zena as a 10-year-old but I didn't know what it meant at the time and there was an interview in 2001. And the writers and creators were like we did right by Zena, we did the right thing. And reading it when I was in grad school and had been exposed to hundreds of lesbian deaths, I was just like, wow, they really think they were special and not just perpetuating a trope that had existed for a hundred years. So it really started because I knew I wanted to do something on the Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall. The Well of Loneliness is often considered the first English language lesbian novel. That's not entirely true. I mean, it's not really true at all, but I think it was the biggest one. So people are like, oh yeah, this is the first and so I want to do something on that.
Speaker 1:I started that like I started that project my first semester in grad school and it really drove home the importance of representation and how representation influences how real life, sapphic women live their lives. And I think what was most jarring for me is that Radcliffe had a great life. Radcliffe Hall had a really great life. They had a woman who loved I'm going to use they, them pronouns for Radcliffe, because their gender identity and expression is still up for debate but they went by John with their closest friends, so I'm going with they, them. So they had a woman who loved them. They raised a kid together. The woman who loved them, una, basically brought hell down upon the guy who tried to ruin Radcliffe's life before they wrote the book.
Speaker 1:And then, yes, they did lose their legal battle over the loneliness in England, but they did not lose it in the United States and they made a ton of money off of selling the book in the US. So they wrote this really tragic story where two lesbians die not the two main characters, but two other lesbians die not the two main characters, but two other lesbians die and the two main characters do not get their happy ending. And yet they were living like the sapphic dream, where they had enough money to be super happy. They had a woman who, like, stood by them through hell and high water. And that's not the story they chose to write.
Speaker 1:And none of their books that have, or novels that have like sapphic representation, had a happy ending. So it was weird to me that they lived this really happy life and didn't write about that in their stories. So that was really like where I got this inspiration to look at why we write tragic narratives instead of telling the truth, which is that, like for a lot of queer writers, life is pretty good like if you have the time to write. Lot of queer writers, life is pretty good, like if you have the time to write as a queer person. Like, life is pretty good for the most part.
Speaker 3:I love that and I'm curious, like how did you navigate, like the emotional challenges of researching such a such tragic portrayals while maintaining academic rigor?
Speaker 1:I started my graduate school process like three years after getting over opiate addiction, so I had zero reaction to it and, like I think we forget or we tend to cover up the fact that addiction is really prevalent in LGBTQ communities, and so I do want to call attention to the fact that having an opiate addiction until I was 19 made it really easier for me to look at terribly sad topics and not be impacted by them, because my neural responders were shot In terms of maintaining academic rigor.
Speaker 1:It was very hard to have to respond emotionally to the books and the plays and the early movies and then think about how to explain this first to other queer people and then to my dissertation committee, who, my dissertation chair by the end of the project was a cishet man. Who's lovely love, dr dawson. Like no shade to alan dawson, but it was definitely interesting to like have to navigate the dissertation writing process and then my defense, knowing that a lot of the things that I take for granted, a lot of things that I find like inherent in my queerness, aren't as like translatable to a cishet audience as I would like them to be, and so having to figure out how to do that was probably harder than just, like you know, navigating the numbers and figuring out the stats and deciding whether or not suicide is like a different category from random murder and how that works for dead lesbian syndrome.
Speaker 3:Fascinating. Wow. Just another question I'm curious about like when you initially brought up this topic to them, what was their reaction? Was there any like levels of like homophobia at all? When kind of presenting to them, or how did that process kind of unravel, all right?
Speaker 1:I'm not going to put anyone at Drew on blast because that would be unprofessional.
Speaker 1:But I did have one professor suggest that I publish my findings in porn studies. Couldn't figure out where that worked. Like how that would fit into writing about a bunch of books and plays, none of which included nudity. I think I don't think any of the books or plays that I read included a sex scene at all. So it was a strange comment to get my initial dissertation.
Speaker 1:Share is queer, and I believe she did her graduate research on playboy. So like it was a lot easier to convince her to just be like yeah, sure, that no-transcript. I mean she was still on my dissertation committee but she left the school as a full-time professor. So it was. I had to find a new professor and luckily Alan Dawson was just like yeah, no, this sounds great and it really, because my PhD is in history and culture. A lot of my research focused on anthropology and he's an anthropologist, so it was easy to be like look, this is what I want to do, I can map it onto symbolic anthropology, like it really was in his field of interest. It just was a different group of people that we were analyzing. So I think it was easy to use the tools that he focused on, use the tools that he taught me and then apply it to the queer community.
Speaker 3:Amazing. We love. We love inspiring teachers who are, you know, are collaborators and push us to do what we want to do in education. So that's amazing. So I would love to take a step back around kind of the historical context around dead lesbian syndrome and kind of tap into, like the historical and cultural factors that gave rise to dead lesbian syndrome as a trope, and then how do these still resonate today? Do you think this is still pervasive, and we'd love your opinion on that.
Speaker 1:So my research did not include the German novels that were written like in the 1870s and 1880s. My German is good. It is not 500 pages of dead lesbian good. So I went. My research is totally Anglo, very much Britain, the US and a little bit of like the other settler colonies.
Speaker 1:From an American perspective, dead lesbian syndrome really comes into existence after the heavy news coverage of the day that Alice Mitchell murdered Freda Ward in 1892. So in 1892, in January of 1892, alice Mitchell attacks Freda Ward like in public, slits her throat and leaves her body on the train tracks and everyone's like what? What in God's name just happened? And it turns. Alice Mitchell goes home, right, she commits the murder, goes home, tells her mom what happened and her mom's like well for going to the police and soice's lawyers and attorneys put in a plea of insanity. And then they show everyone that alice had written freda like a ton of love letters and there was even an engagement ring because the two women had decided they were going to run away together and alice was going to live as alvin in a new state and they were going to live as husband and wife.
Speaker 1:Freda, who was 17 at the time, went and lived with her other sister, like after this declaration was made, after the engagement was agreed upon, and the older sister was like you're not marrying a woman. This is not appropriate. And so when Alice found out that Freda wanted to break off the engagement, she murdered Freda. And so that happens. In 1892. Alice is of course found guilty. She's sent to live in the Tennessee Insane Asylum where she eventually dies of either tuberculosis or suicide. The records are sketchy there. But three years later there are three different novels that come out with lesbian characters. So in 1895, you have three novels come out with lesbian characters.
Speaker 1:In one of them, which is called Norma, Trist, there is a hypnotist who is able to hypnotize the main character out of her lesbian attraction, and so she's saved through the power of hypnotism. Then there's the long arm, which is about an elderly woman who commits murder, and she does it because she's been in love with the woman that she killed forever. And then, yeah, she ends up like going to jail, obviously, and it's not told from her perspective, it's told from the perspective of the daughter of the people that the lesbian had murdered. Right, so it's not even from the lesbian's perspective. And then there's the mysterious disappearance of Eugene Comstock, which is also written in 1895.
Speaker 1:And in that one there's a dandy, right Like a Robin Hood-esque character that no one's ever seen up close, who ends up being both the man leading the Robin Hood contingent, trying to steal from the bank, and one of the women living in town.
Speaker 1:And she tells this story about how she was born a woman but raised as a little boy because her dad always wanted a son.
Speaker 1:But then she escaped her overbearing mother as a young man and lived in Europe as a man for a while and then came to the US and seduced a woman living as a man, but then it was found out that she wasn't a man. And then they moved to Maine and in Maine they lived as both Rosa, who was like the friend of one of the bank owners daughters, and as the dandy, who was this like man leading the robin hood fellowship, and she commits suicide. Because they commit suicide because they feel like they're in this, like it's either prison or suicide at this point, and right before they commit suicide they kill their horse, their faithful steed, whose name is satan. So that's, that's also that. So that happens happens in 1895. So in those three stories you've got two dead lesbians and one hypnotized woman who may or may not be gay, we don't really know there, and that pretty much sets the stage for the next hundred years.
Speaker 3:Wow, I didn't know any of that information Like really amazing and I'm curious to know, like as it pertains to like censorship laws like the Comstock laws, how did they reinforce these portrayals in early media?
Speaker 1:The idea of the Comstock laws is that you can't mail anything obscene. But the word obscene doesn't really have a legal meaning in America, so we use like British common law to explain what obscene is and also just the judge making a decision really, so that the obscenity laws really prevent certain things from happening. It prevents you from mailing things out, which means if you're a book publisher you can't mail out books that are ruled obscene because you can't use the mail system. It also shuts down in 1927. It shuts down a play called the captive which is supposed to premiere on broadway and obviously has nothing to do with the mail, so nothing to do with comstock, but it does have to do with new york's obscenity laws. And basically the play is it's about a husband and wife, but the wife is in love with an older woman. The older woman is dying. So we know at the end of the play that this older woman is going to die very soon and you think, oh well, the wife is obviously going to stay with her husband because her lover is going to die very soon. But the play ends with the woman choosing to go be with her dying lover instead of staying with her husband. It was written by a man, a French man, who just thought that lesbians were fascinating, and it was scheduled to be performed on Broadway in 1927. And, like, a week before opening day, the judge shut it down. What's interesting about it is that the actors who were in the play actually went to the courthouse and were like we believe in this play, we believe in what it's saying, like we think these people deserve to be seen on stage. It's saying like we think these people deserve to be seen on stage. So really early, like 1927, activism by people who were not openly queer now they're in broadway, who knows? But but they weren't openly queer. So you see some early like co-conspirators being like, hey, we wanted to play these roles, like we've been, we've been, we've been practicing and rehearsing for months now, like let us do it. And the judge, judge shut it down.
Speaker 1:A year later, the Will of Loneliness is published in England and pretty much immediately shut down because of a very concerted effort by the conservative press to prevent it from being circulated. It comes to the US. It's originally supposed to be published in the US by NOL and they pull out once this trial takes place in England, and so it's published by a smaller publishing house called Covici Fridi. So obviously, like a random Italian man and a random Jewish man who are much more willing to be progressive than Knopf is at the time to go to war, they're like we're going, they actually put, they stage the selling of the book so that they can bring it to the New York judge, because they believe that the New York judge is going to be more progressive than any other major city judge and it just makes sense to like have this guy rule on it, have it be ruled not obscene, and then keep going. And because there's a heavy emphasis on like Catholicism in the book, because there's a heavy emphasis on friendship in the book, because there is no sexual act in the Well of Loneliness at all. The closest we get to a sexual act is a line in which the narrator tells us that the two women characters shared the same pillow. So other than that there's no sexual act. And so because of that it was not ruled obscene in New York.
Speaker 1:It was allowed to circulate and after that there was no other court case. So the well-williness was able to survive in the United States. There aren't any other cases after that. It was much more like a conscious decision by people, both men and women and non-binary writers, choosing to self-censor to avoid having to go to court or internalizing their own lesbophobia. That prevented them from believing that lesbian characters deserved a happy ending, and we don't really know where the mentality is coming from. Unfortunately, as deep as I dug, there's not very many like letters or reflections or diary entries from the people who were writing these books at the time and the one person who did like document her writing process, anne Bannon, who created Be Well Brinker. She creates a happy ending, so like we know why she did it. She had happy endings, brinker. She creates a happy ending. So like we know why she did it. She had happy endings. She wanted to show a happy ending. Everyone else they didn't. There's not really much reflection that survived.
Speaker 3:Fascinating and just I'm curious. So there's often more unhappy endings and happy endings for lesbians in literature and media in general. What do you think that's the reasoning behind that? Is that a reflection of the culture condemning lesbianism, or how would you unpack that?
Speaker 1:I mean there's definitely an intersectional thing going on here. It is both misogyny and queer phobia, right, it's the belief that, well, a gay man isn't taking a woman off the market and so when we have this patriarchal scarcity mindset, there's very much this fear that a lesbian is going to take a good woman off the market. In many of these books there's the lesbian predator and then the bisexual woman who starts the book with a man and either ends the book in an insane asylum, dead or married to that man. Right, the lesbian doesn't get to win in this story.
Speaker 1:My favorite novel from the 1930s is called Pity for Women and it's by Helen Anderson and it's really, really hard to find, but it does exist, and in it the lesbian character who is the main love interest her name is Judith.
Speaker 1:She calls herself a thief in society and says that her crime is one for which there is no compassion, there's no remorse and there's no redemption, because she's stealing a good woman from a good man. The book begins with the bisexual main character being in a relationship with a guy who seems pretty chill. He seems like an okay guy. He's compared to another man who tries to sexually assault her. So, like first guy tries to sexually assault her. This guy she's dating is super chill, not a rapist, so we like him. But then she finds Judith and falls in love with Judith and Judith's like I'm a thief, I'm stealing this woman from a good man. And that book ends with the bisexual main character becoming catatonic as she's about to say her marriage vows to Judith. So they have a cute little wedding ceremony and Judith says her vows and then she looks at the main character and the main character has gone catatonic.
Speaker 3:I would love to kind of actually discuss now, looking at the impact of what does lesbian syndrome does to viewers and, like the wider community. In your opinion, how do these tragic portrayals specifically affect young queer women or young queer people searching for representation and, in your understanding of it, what are the mental health implications that you've observed of dead lesbian syndrome in general?
Speaker 1:So one of the best books for like understanding lesbian culture in the 30s, 40s and 50s is Boots of Leather, slippers of Gold, which is basically a compendium of oral histories from women who were in the Buffalo bar scene. Buffalo, new York bar scene at that time mentioned the well of loneliness and there's very much like an emphasis on this book being the way in to queer culture for many of these women. So they're reading 400 pages ish. Yeah, I want to say about 400 pages. The first 200 are about how much this tomboy likes her horse. Like the love between the main character and her horse is probably better written than the love between the main character and any of the women that she ends up sleeping with.
Speaker 1:So we love the horse In fact, some of the contemporaneous reviews, like in the 1920s, were very focused on how much Stephen Gordon loved her horse. And then you have the next 200 pages in which this like perfect, adorable lesbian couple ends up with one partner dying of tuberculosis and then the other one hanging herself because she misses her girlfriend so much. And then in the end the main character, Stephen Gordon, tells her girlfriend, Mary, that she cheated on her to end the relationship because she realizes that she can't give Mary a kid. So the concept here is like every queer woman wants a child. I can't give Mary a child. Therefore I am a failure as a partner. She should go be with my friend, who's a man from Canada that Mary is like, not really interested in, but he holds her when she finds out that Stephen Gordon has cheated on her, which is a lie, and so Stephen's like and now they can be together.
Speaker 1:And then you have three pages of just Radcliffe Hall writing to straight audiences saying you should care about us. So these early novels that these women are reading, that they can get their hands on, are tragic. They're very tragic. In the 1930s there are two novels written by the same woman, Gail Wilhelm, where there's a happy ending. Every other lesbian novel at this time there's not a happy ending and I'm fairly confident that I read all the lesbian novels of the 1930s. There are two in which there was a happy ending and they're also happy endings, but they're not framed as happy endings. They're framed as sad endings for the male main love interests.
Speaker 3:Right, right, right, right, yep.
Speaker 1:Tragedy, that these two women are happy together and this man lost his partner. So these are the stories that these women are reading. And then they're moving to Buffalo because it's a big city at the time and because because it's a big city, like there's jobs there and it's the great depression and then it's world war II and these women either have the choice of getting a job or getting married, and they don't want to get married to men. So they moved to Buffalo and in Buffalo there's a ton of queer bars, like there's gay men bars, there's lesbian bars, like alcohol is free flowing, nobody cards, and it's basically just like this chance to get to know other queer women, whatever that means in your carl. And there's also like serial monogamy. So you have women who like, hook up with this one girl for six months, they break up and then a week later they're hooking up with another girl for six months and it's just like a cycle of getting drunk, having sex, staying together, like moving in together, living together for six months, breaking up, getting drunk, having sex, staying together, like moving in together, living together for six months, breaking up, getting drunk, having sex and repeating that cycle.
Speaker 1:And a lot of that comes from the fact that, like they don't believe they get a happy ending. You've had all these stories tell you there is no happy ending for you, and so you might as well get your kicks in while you can. Alcohol numbs the pain. Sex is easy endorphins and you can tell if the honeymoon period is real once those endorphins go away at month six to month 18, they're gone. There's no long-term commitment there either, because you don't believe that you deserve your happy ending. I am not a psychologist, I have not done deep research into this, but you have institutes like the Geena Davis Institute with the tagline if they can see it, they can be it. If all queer girls are seeing is death, insanity and unhappiness, then they conclude that the answer is death, insanity or unhappiness. And we know that, like LGBTQ, americans suffer from depression at much higher rates than their cis friends.
Speaker 3:So fascinating, yeah, and I think, like in general, it's like when you're told those type of you know tropes over and over again, you start to believe it and I think, even today, like we're still combating that with media, whether it's books, shows what have you? And it's like if that's the message you're getting, then that's the message you'll start to believe and that's the power and impact of media and of representation, especially good representation for queer people. So totally, totally see that that's fascinating. So your research of lesbian novels often serves as travel guides for subcultures. How do these works shape community resilience despite their tragic themes?
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that most of these novels did really well was show the importance of having one gay friend, just like knowing that there's someone else out there who is like you. And we know that many of the letters that are written to queer writers at this time people are like oh, I live in Omaha, nebraska, and I've never met anyone who has the same interests that I do, and this book told me that I wasn't alone. So there's definitely like this concept of imagined communities where it's you're not traveling to New York City to actually live it, but you're able to connect with that community through reading about it. In this novel it also told people hey, if you move to New York City or Buffalo, new York or Los Angeles, you might find some other queer people in the bars there. So pack your things and move out. And we know that that is a trend that happens. Right, every baby queer dreams of moving to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. I grew up 10 minutes from New York. I didn't have to move here for queer community, but yes, so yeah, I think there's definitely like an emphasis on the importance of having one queer friend, but there's also an emphasis on the importance of alcohol in like making things easier for queer people. And I think we've all really internalized that. I mean we all still go to gay bars all of the time like queer community is still built in gay bars. So we definitely.
Speaker 1:I think, because so many of the lesbian and gay pulp novels of the thirties and forties emphasized the safe haven of the gay bar.
Speaker 1:We've really made that a part of our culture in a way that other places weren't and one of the gay bar. We've really made that a part of our culture in a way that other places weren't. And one of the things that I think is really important to look at is the fact that most, if not all, of the writers before the 60s were white people and they're writing about white communities and you don't really see anything about, like the ballroom scene because there weren't really white people in the ballroom scene. So that whole part of queer culture doesn't make it into the written record the way that the middle and working class white gay bars made it into the queer stories and the queer culture. We do get a bit of that in Buffalo because there's like trains that take you to Harlem and there's a bunch of queer bars in Harlem. So there is some discussion there. For the most part there's like three black women interviewed in boots of leather slippers of gold, as opposed to like 20 or 30 white women.
Speaker 3:So Wow, that's interesting and I think, like that speaks to how, in general, queer people, even those that are within the queer community, oftentimes understand the power of intersectionality and how we need to be including all people within our wider community to be able to tell their stories, to be able to preserve their history, because you know there are more that are coming after them that won't have this history to look at and understand themselves, understand the culture, understand the history behind their identity and the community that they come from, and I think that's you know it's hard, but there are, you know, only a handful of those types of things, like Paris is Burning would be a good example of that, of like the ballroom culture scene, but not in the way that you know.
Speaker 3:We look at other queer content and it definitely skews more white, gay, cisgender, male, and I think that's a disservice to the whiter community because we don't get to see, you know, the complexities and the beautiful diversity of our community and all of that, the people that make up it. So really, really unfortunate. And so, given that, I would love to talk about, kind of the path forward towards change and what are the steps that you know, creators, filmmakers, writers, studios can take to disrupt those harmful tropes and promote more positive portrayals of queer women.
Speaker 1:I think not using a queer woman as a shock factor would be a great place to start. The dead lesbian syndrome is still very much alive and well in our culture today. Dead lesbian syndrome is still very much alive and well in our culture today. I Care A Lot.
Speaker 1:The 2020 movie was one of the most shocking endings that I've ever experienced as a queer woman, because it's the last 15 seconds of the movie where she gets stabbed and is left to die on the steps of a building that she's walking into and it's just completely jarring for that reason. And then you know Beef, that came out what? Two years ago, the film series like randomly makes one of the characters queer out of nowhere. You're just like, oh okay, she's a lesbian, now Cool. And then has her brutally sliced in half while her bisexual lover is in catatonic shock and cannot hit the emergency button. So it's not like we've moved past this type of trope in any way. So I think like moving forward, not sacrificing a woman for the purpose of creating shock, would be a great place to start. We do tend to use women characters straight, straight or queer to further the plot, primarily for, like men, main characters, and if we recognize that women are people and they should be three dimensional characters who can't be like sacrificed for the plot. That would be a great place to start.
Speaker 1:I think also there needs to be more education for writers around the fact that, like dead lesbian syndrome is a trope that has perpetuated the stories of lesbians for over a century now like we're talking 130 years at this point and it is very specific to the experiences of queer women, because I did I did a quantitative research study back in 2017 where I looked at all of the deaths that have been recorded of sapphic characters and of queer men characters.
Speaker 1:Sapphic women are killed at a rate of three to one when it comes to queer men, and that, like I don't want any of the queer characters to die, but there definitely is like a layer of misogyny that is here because the queer women are more likely to end up dead than the queer men are, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that writers want the bisexual to end up with a man and, for some reason, writing two lesbians is outside of their realm of possibility.
Speaker 1:So I think there also needs to be a recognition of the fact that if you keep writing bisexual women, characters who end up with men at the end of the story you're doing a harm against the bisexual community because everyone, like every lesbian I've ever dated has been like, oh, but you're gonna leave me for a man and I'm like, no, I'm probably not actually like men are great, but I don't really date them, so probably not gonna happen.
Speaker 1:But that is like the story that so many lesbian women grow up with and it's always that fear that, like you know, do you really want a kid and you're just with me until you can find a man who can give that to you. Do you just like, want societal acceptance and you're willing to sacrifice our relationship to get that societal acceptance. There's always this fear that, like bisexual women specifically, are going to be sneaky and leave them for, not for someone who would make them happier, but specifically for society to accept them, because that's the narrative that we've been fed over and over and over again. So I think also recognizing that bisexual people are queer would be cool, because that is like.
Speaker 1:I mean bisexual women are one thing. Bisexual men rarely ever get any play on screen, in books, on the stage, and there's a lot of internalized fear there for bisexual men because you know there's no trust there at all because our pop culture constantly tells us not to trust them. So trusting bisexuals would be a great place to start. Not using women for shock value, like women of any sexual identity for shock value, would be a great place to start.
Speaker 1:And also just letting more queer women write stories would be great, because a lot of the times, these tropes are written by men who want to include a lesbian character, either because they're sexy or because it's shock value, and not because they actually care about telling genuine queer stories.
Speaker 3:Yeah, A hundred percent. And I'm curious, what are, what is your impression of, like the real world impact of dead lesbian syndrome outside of films and literature and stuff like that? Like do you think that that contributes to you know, issues within safety for queer women?
Speaker 1:Would love for you to kind of unpack that. So bisexual women are the most likely to face domestic abuse out of like every sort of sexual identity. That's a lie. Bisexual men and trans women are the most likely to experience domestic abuse, but most trans women are bisexual. So you know, statistically. And so I think a lot of that comes from the fact that men can't imagine a world in which a lesbian is equal to them, because so many, so much of our pop culture tells us that lesbians are expendable. And so why would you leave me for a woman, or why would you even want a woman when you could have me? We also live in a world of the penis trumps, all right. So bisexual women have to be attracted to men, and bisexual men have to be attracted to men, and women just aren't good sexual partners. According to this ideology, and by perpetuating ideas like the bury your gays trope and the dead lesbian syndrome trope, they're not really killing the queer people, the bisexual people. They're killing those who are monosexual. They're killing the lesbian women and the gay men because they want that bisexual partner to end up with a straight person at the end of the story.
Speaker 1:I think we internalize a lot of the popular culture that we consume. I'm rereading bell hooks, which I think every queer professor says at least every six months. But I'm rereading bell hooks and she does have an emphasis on the fact that because our pop culture is so violent, because so many of our movies are so violent, we've really allowed ourselves to be desensitized to violence. If all of not all, but if the majority of our movies and books and plays are telling us that lesbians are expendable, it desensitizes us to lesbian death. Like again, the beef had a lesbian get chopped in half multiple times and none of like.
Speaker 1:The test audience said, hey, this is way too much, we should stop. I don multiple times and none of like. The test audience said, hey, this is way too much, we should stop. I don't know. It just seems like violence against queer women is really just violence against women and we have so normalized violence against women in this society that it you know, women have very low self-worth. We have very low expectations for how we're going to be treated. The bar is on the floor when it comes to dating men. The bar is on the ground because if he doesn't beat me, he's a good guy, and that is primarily because pop culture teaches us that men are violent.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wow, literally we need to put that on a t-shirt, because that is such a truth that a lot of people maybe fail to understand. Or if they do, it's just kind of they have to accept it as an inevitability, which is really unfortunate. But I'm curious on the flip side of it, what are, like the titles, the filmmakers, creators, writers that stand out to you that are getting it right? Because I know that's less than the ones that are getting it. You know the ones getting it wrong are more than the ones that are getting it right.
Speaker 1:I mean, I thought Ratchet was very well done, because you have the expectation of dead lesbian syndrome and then the woman who's dying of cancer is magically saved. What is she magically saved? By Spearmint or something else? That's ridiculous. So like you totally have this expectation that she's going to die because she's going to die, and then all of a sudden she's saved and everything is good. My girlfriend is making me watch from the horror series I'm just starting that one.
Speaker 1:That one's really good, yes it is terrifying and I have not slept very well since watching it, but I'm getting there. But they introduce a character early on. Her name is Christy and you think that she's going to end up with this character, kenny right, who is a cishet man I'm going to spoil it for you. Now Turns out that her girlfriend, her fiance, her woman fiance, from before she gets trapped in this little town, ends up in the town with her. So now she's stuck in between this position where, like she really had feelings for kenny, she's been stuck in this town for a year, like she's falling for him and her fiance is back.
Speaker 1:And I think that from does a really good job of like making christy's queerness evident from the beginning. Like she came on screen and my girlfriend was like, well, she's bisexual. And I was like, yes, yes, she's very much. But also like not making it a tragic story, like it's the end of season three now and they're all still alive somehow. So you definitely see this like attention paid to each character having their own like full embodied experience as a character.
Speaker 1:Like the love triangle is not the main focus. Kenny and Marielle can talk to each other without like knives coming into play, like there is very much an emphasis on hey, we have to get along in order to survive these weird zombie vampire guys, but also, like you kissed my girl and I can't believe you're engaged the woman that I'm in love with. So there's definitely like growth and character development. And even if at this point, christy or Marielle dies in the next season, they still did justice to making these women full characters who live in a world where everyone is dying. So if everyone is dying, tropes don't exist, right? We understand that if everyone dies in the universe, then dead lesbian syndrome is just a part of the fact that everyone is dying. So making sure your characters are three-dimensional is really important. And then I loved Bottoms. Like I hate how much I love Bottoms.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, bottoms, yes, yes, yes, it was so cute, it was so cute it's not like the genre of movies that I usually watch, but I love Punky Johnson, so there's that. But also written and developed and directed by queer women definitely focuses on queer joy and the difficulties of getting through high school and what it means to just live life as a queer person who has a crush and like, wants things to play out. I know that our cane is really big right now and so glad that Kate and Vi make it to the end, even if they both become cops. We're ignoring that, which is great. But I have this theory that I like introduced in my dissertation that I haven't really fleshed out much, that I call transference where it's the. I mean transference is a word, but transference when it comes to dead lesbian syndrome is this concept that the lesbian only gets to live because someone else has to be sacrificed for her to live.
Speaker 1:Where Alcott has Beth die, beth who is like the perfect, adorable baby sister so that Joe can live her life. Because Joe isn't willing to get married. She isn't willing to like become a mother until Beth dies. And you definitely everyone knows that Joe is queer. It's very evident Joe is queer. Alcott writes in their journal that Joe is queer, like Joe was definitely the character that alcott was projecting onto, and alcott had a very non-binary view of their gender for 1865. So we know that joe is queer in some way, and it's only through beth's death that joe is able to like, get her life in order and move forward and do what she needs to do to survive in society with arcane.
Speaker 1:Yes, kate and Vi make it to the end, which is awesome, but Jinx has to sacrifice herself in order for Kate to be happy. There's no, from Jinx's perspective, there is no possibility of Kate being happy with both Vi and Jinx alive, and so Jinx sacrifices herself, although I do think she survived I have dreams that Jinx survived but she sacrifices herself so that her big sister can find happiness. And so, yes, great, thank you for not killing the lesbians. But happy endings are possible. Like there is a chance, autostraddlecom did research in 2017, 2018, where they looked at every but every sapphic character on television from 1976 until 2016. They determined that only 10 of all lesbian characters got a happy ending. So, like 90 of lesbian story lesbian and bisexual because I think it was just sapphic Like 90% of sapphic story arcs end with the lesbian unhappy or the sapphic woman unhappy.
Speaker 1:So you know we can write happy endings, 10% is still 10%. It's just that we're not writing them as much as we should be.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I remember one sapphic storyline that still haunts me is the love story of Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I know is very common. But like I love Buffy first of all it is like queer. It was part of my queer awakening in some ways like and I think like that love story, because they took a character who originally was heterosexual for all intents and purposes in the first few seasons and then that shift happened. I think in my mind it really opened my eyes to like that you know you don't have to fit within this heterosexual world just because that's what you've always been, you know, been in. And I think for me I didn't come out until I was in my twenties so to see that at such a formative time of my, my youth, I think was really important for me to come to grips with my own sexuality.
Speaker 3:And I think, like I was very devastated when Tara had passed away because I was just like no, I was like I like them together and like it was just so devastating to see that happen and, you know, for it to be something that before, even you know, having met you like understanding that this was a trope, that was happening all the time and for decades and centuries before. Like that is. So I've learned so much in the process of, like researching this and, you know, reading your dissertation, that it's just it's honestly just so fascinating that this has been so frequent. But it's. It makes sense because of how deeply steeped our culture is in misogyny and homophobia and all, all of the phobias really. But like it's, it's really disheartening that this is something that still happens today, in 2025. Like it's wild. Like we are so advanced and yet we are so not. You know what I mean At the end of the day. So it's, it's wild.
Speaker 1:Tara is killed. I didn't watch by as a kid. I'm gonna prep, I know, but look, my queer awakening was bring it on, because eliza is everything anyway. Also, one of my best friends is albanian and he was like in love with her, so I'm also in love with her, but that's fine. But so tara is killed by a random spell going wrong and like hitting her accidentally right and that's how she dies I think it was a gunshot.
Speaker 3:It was a gunshot, so it was a gunshot.
Speaker 1:So then, in the 100, which I also didn't watch I don't watch a lot of television- in case. That's fair, that's okay so in the 100 which takes, which is filmed in 2016. So in what tara dies on what? Oh 102, something like that right around early, early 2000s.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, so 15 years later, the writers of the 100 kill off Lexa by having another random projectile go for someone else and then just get batted away and kill this queer character, right? And this was the. I think it was an arrow heard around the world. We had Clexacon because of it, we had the hashtag stop killing fictional lesbians because of it. Like it, it really set off people.
Speaker 1:But I had to invent a whole new category of death for the number of times that queer women were killed by random projectiles that were not aimed at them. I think it ended up being like at least nine women out of the 217 I was looking at from the television series were killed from a random projectile that was not shot at them and for me, like it was this like karmic reckoning like you're such an evil person for being queer and for stealing a good, straight woman, right, Because Willow was straight until she meets Tara. So there's definitely this like you deserve to die, but we're not going to kill you directly. We're not going to blame anyone for your death. You can't, no one can be blamed for your death because it was a random projectile shot at someone else that ended up killing you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's wild that that is even like a common trope that they are using. Like you said, what 10, 15 years later? Like let's get creative folks, come on, there's like we don't need to do first of all, we don't need to murder the lesbians but also like we can let them have a happy ending and like no projectiles anywhere.
Speaker 1:And no cars. Oh my God, andre, the number of times lesbian. The first lesbian on television was killed 10 minutes after professing her love. She was in a show called executive suite in 1976. So she walks upstairs, tells this other girl that she's in love with her, and then the girl's husband shows up and attacks her and she walks out into traffic and gets hit by an oncoming car which is also like a random car just hits her because she walks in the middle of the street.
Speaker 1:That's also how the main lesbian dies in the 1936 film Children of Loneliness. And it's also how they kill the lesbian no, the bisexual character Kat in 2012 in the lesbian TV show Lip Service, which is a British TV show. So, like lesbians, bisexual, we should not be near cars. No one should let us near cars.
Speaker 3:No streets, no cars, none of that, absolutely that's wild. Like what that's wild. Okay, so would love to talk about kind of the advice you have to emerging queer storytellers on how to champion authentic narratives that have a happy ending.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think the most important thing is to write from experiences that you're having. I mean, obviously, like fantasy and sci-fi super important but one of the things that continuously frustrates me is that most of these sapphic writers had decent lives, had women who loved them, like had committed relationships that didn't last, that lasted much longer than 18 months, and yet the stories that they ended up writing were not happy. And, yes, of course, like coming out is hard. Being queer in society is hard, Like I think most bisexual women will tell you. Like it's difficult. But we have moments of joy and writing about those moments of joy allows other young queer kids growing up to know that they will. They will also have queer moments of joy. I think I know it's a, it's a hackneyed statement, but like write the stories that you needed as a kid. Yeah, I didn't need to watch xena get shot with a thousand arrows and then have her body dragged across the war like the battlefield. That wasn't a thing I needed. I needed my hero to like be victorious and live a happy.
Speaker 1:They didn't kill hercules but they killed. I mean, they killed hercules multiple times but they didn't end with killing hercules, they ended with Xena Like. Just write the stories that make you feel joy, and I get it. As someone who, like, lives with depression and is an addict, I understand the desire to dive into the darker elements of human emotions, of queer identity, but we also need happy stories.
Speaker 1:So, if you're going to write, write a happy story or two, or write a story like Ratchet, where it's not a happy story at all, but neither lesbians die at the end.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree. And what do you think the role of allies outside of our community, and maybe even just the broader LGBTQ community, plays in amplifying these positive stories and challenging these harmful tropes?
Speaker 1:I mean go see more lesbian movies. Honestly, this is going to come off as slightly misandrist, but if you look at Archive of Our Own and you look at the fan fiction rates, the top 10 most written about couples are gay men. Gay men are not writing all of those stories. It is mostly straight women who are writing all of those stories. It's also mostly like bisexual women and gay women who are writing all those stories because we think it's cute, like yes, let's make the two little boys kiss each other. It's adorable. You don't see the same love for lesbian couples. You don't see that type of like allyship from the straight community around lesbian couples. And maybe it's because all the straight men just want to watch lesbian porn and they don't want to write cute stories about lesbians. But it would be great if we had more allies, more co-conspirators writing stories about lesbians or including lesbians.
Speaker 1:In your story about straight people, like Scream 6 included lesbians including lesbians. In your story about straight people, like scream six included lesbians. Did they then kill off the queer character that they just invest? Yeah, yes, of course they did. But they had a queer storyline written as like side characters to this straight story. I'm okay with being a side character if it means that I get some sort of visibility, full stop, right. But yeah, I mean just like go and see more sapphic movies, because heart stopper, like topped charts and love lies bleeding did not top him with love lies beating. Good movie, not really, but it was. It was there and I watched it. Because if we don't I tell my girlfriend this all the time if we don't I tell my girlfriend this all the time if we don't watch the bad movies, there will never be enough of a demand to create good movies. Right.
Speaker 1:And so, like I, will watch everything that Ryan Murphy puts out, in hopes that we one day get much better movies about queer representation. And also there's a. There's a sapphic television platform now called Ello that I'm a little bit obsessed with.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 1:It's $6 a month, just put money. You don't even have to watch the movies, just pay for the thing, and that would be a great way to support queer creatives. As ridiculous or as overplayed as it is, you vote with your dollar right as consumers. In a capitalist society, the way that we show support for people is by consuming the art that they create. So the more there is a demand for sapphic love stories, for sapphic adventure stories, for sapphic fantasy like, the greater the chance that we will have happy endings.
Speaker 3:Yeah, boom Mic, drop on that one. That was great, awesome. Okay, let's go into our compulsory questions. This is more of kind of like just very quick answers, although you're absolutely welcome to add some context, because we love context here. So my first one is what is your go to in parentheses queer anthem that never fails to get you pumped.
Speaker 1:So my favorite song that plays on repeat all the time is Float by Janelle Monet. I am obsessed with that. Like as a bisexual, polyamorous woman, I am obsessed with that song and I will. I know every word. I quote it in class all the time. My sweet little Zoomer students are like, yeah, but you won't sing it like she does. And I'm like, no, because I'm white and I will screw it up. But I can like. I can quote every line.
Speaker 3:I love that. If your LGBTQ plus identity came with a warning label, what would it say?
Speaker 1:So probably polyamorous bisexual Libra fall in love. With caution, because I can't make a decision so why do you have to make a decision?
Speaker 3:That's the spice of life.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I can just have everything, can't I? I don't understand Exactly. Exactly, I can just have everything can't I?
Speaker 3:I don't understand Exactly. Yeah. Who says If you could have a queer superpower, what would it be?
Speaker 1:Probably the ability that Professor X has in X-Men, where he builds Cerebro and he can find all the cute little baby mutants and bring them home. I just want to be able to find all the cute little queer kids and bring them home so that they grow up in safe environments. That is my dream, like.
Speaker 3:I just want to find them. I love that. Oh my gosh, that would be a really good movie. And there's all the metaphors with X-Men of like queerness and being outsiders. So if we really turned up the queerness of it, I think that would be a really good series. What is your favorite piece of queer content right now that you're reading consuming? I know you don't watch a lot of shows, but would love to hear anything, even a book that you're reading that you would recommend for people to read or tune into.
Speaker 1:I really loved Wild Geese by Sula Emanuel. It's a novel that came out last year. The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton is also a great book. Loved that. It's a sapphic space story. And then, because I'm from Jersey and I grew up outside of Newark, cycles by Jasmine Manns is probably the greatest performance art, spoken word, poetry, video mashup I've ever seen, and it's free, so that makes it even better, right. But yeah, jasmine Mann's Queer Black Artist from Newark Cycles is my favorite thing.
Speaker 3:I love that. And then the last question is if you could give your younger queer self a piece of advice, what would it be?
Speaker 1:Probably to not be afraid to like the people that I liked. I think I was constantly vacillating between saying I was straight and saying I was a lesbian and saying I was straight and like being afraid to like talk to guys because I didn't want to be inauthentic to my queerness. And now I'm just like. You could have saved a lot of heartache if you just like hooked up with the guy you wanted to hook up with.
Speaker 3:So yeah, good for you. I love that. Thank you, dr Rizzuto, for shedding light on this topic. It is crucial that we continue to demand better representation of queer women and challenge the stereotypes that have held us back for so long. Representation matters, and seeing ourselves on screen in all of our complexity is vital for our community's well-being. The tragic trope of queer women in media, often encapsulated as dead lesbian syndrome, is not just a storyline. It's a harmful cycle that shapes how queer women see themselves and are seen by others. Breaking this cycle requires all to demand better, more diverse and authentic portrayals. Representation is not just about visibility. It's about the quality of that visibility. Together, we can create a universe where queer women thrive on and off screen, showing every young viewer that their story is worth fully living. Thank you so much again for joining me on the Queerest Podcast, dr Rizzuto. It has been such a pleasure. You're brilliant, you're amazing and I'm so grateful to have had this conversation with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, andre, and that's a wrap for this episode of the Queerest Podcast. Thank you for joining us on this cosmic journey through the queer universe. If today's conversation resonated with you, be sure to like, subscribe and share it with your chosen family. Your voice helps grow the queerest community. Until next time, stay curious, I'm gonna die.