Let’s Live Long: The L Word's Multi-Generational Legacy
By Ava Emilione
This week, a sapphic tragedy struck me like an arrow from one of Artemis’ nymphs: I finished watching The L Word for the first time.
When my girlfriend insisted I watch a series about a group of queer Los Angeles women living, laughing, and loving in the early aughts, I didn’t expect to get roped in. Only a couple seasons passed before I found myself empathizing with Bette Porter, a biracial lesbian making moves in the art world, and memorizing the chart, the painfully relatable web of sapphic entanglements that dominate the show.
The chart featured in The L Word
The L Word and its sequel, The L Word: Generation Q, which aired ten years later, represent a society where queer women curate art galleries, dominate international sports, and produce Hollywood movies. The show included queer women thriving across generations, suggesting that decades of juicy gay drama awaits not only the show’s main cast, but all the lesbians watching at home. In a social environment that often fails to represent queer people beyond our youth and attacks our chance at longevity, seeing lesbians navigate adulthood in The L Word feels like a rare, necessary gift. No television program has successfully filled The L Word’s legendary Doc Martens since the show was cancelled in 2009.
Without our beloved version of LA in which beautiful queer women abound, those hungering for lighthearted LGBTQ+ representation are left to the wolfpack: coming-of-age media. In our hunt to witness queer love on screen, theaters and mainstream media force high school romance down our throats time and time again. While shows like Orange is the New Black and Pose, along with movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Love Lies Bleeding, and The Watermelon Woman, capture how queerness ripens with age and experience, much of mainstream media seems hell-bent on promoting the YA agenda.
When I get tired of watching Heartstopper, where two British boys fall in love via rugby games and meaningful glances, I can always watch Euphoria, in which world-weary teens deal drugs, hook up with people from dating apps, and become sex workers all before graduating high school. If I’m in a sapphic mood, I can watch Bottoms, where two baby gays begin a high school fight club to get laid…for the first time ever. Because they’re seventeen. They’re all seventeen. Even Pariah, one of my favorite lesbian films, fails to explore Black queer life beyond high school.
Don’t get me wrong—rainbow flag proms and fruity high school crushes offer much-needed representation for young queer people navigating their sexuality for the first time. I’ve been known to shed real tears over lesbian promposals, but even the best coming-of-age plot doesn’t tell the full story of our lives. Hollywood’s stubborn fixation on youth limits the range of multi-generational queer experiences represented in media.
Even The L Word is not without major flaws. Queer discourse has become (slightly) more intersectional and self-aware over the last two decades, but those wanting to watch lesbian characters of legal drinking age are still forced to tolerate The L Word’s racist and transphobic offenses. Max, the show’s only transgender character, experiences nearly nonstop transphobia from the main cast of cisgender queer women. Tina, Bette’s partner and white movie producer, hesitates to select a Black sperm donor despite planning a child with a Black, biracial woman. The show’s only two Latine characters, Papi and Carmen de la Pica Morales, are played by Indian and Iranian actresses respectively. For most of the show’s six seasons, white and ethnically ambiguous women don flat stomachs and straight hair like a military uniform.
The L Word Cast
The L Word: Generation Q, which aired in 2019, did a better job at representing trans, Latine, Black, Asian, and disabled characters. Much of The L Word’s original cast was featured on Generation Q, continuing their sapphic shenanigans and business ventures into their middle age—Bette Porter even runs for mayor. Generation Q also introduces a cohort of millennial-coded characters. Finley, a chaotic white masc, falls into a messy arrangement with Sophie Suarez, a television producer for Alice’s show. Finley and Sophie’s secret romance threatens Sophie’s engagement to Dani Nuñez, a girlboss with generational wealth working on Bette Porter’s mayoral campaign. Together they tread the information age’s choppy waters, infested with dating apps and side shaves. The show’s sanitized political takes, underdeveloped characters, and shaky dialogues undermined Generation Q’s success. Not even Max's uplifting epilogue, in which he’s revealed to have a loving partner and house full of children, was enough to boost viewership. Showtime cancelled the sequel after three seasons.
Despite its flaws, Generation Q gave us what so many other shows couldn’t: a depiction of multi-generational queer relationships. As the war between lesbian forces of good and evil grows treacherous, the new generation leans on the OG cast for support. When Finley gets out of rehab in Season 3, Shane offers Finley a job at her bar. Bette and Dani support each other through breakups and a Sisyphysian wheel of career changes. On her hit talk show, Alice navigates the brutal television industry with Sophie in tow. The two generations mirror each other, revealing the traditions of queer action and expression: Finley’s messy hookup history mirrors Shane’s youth. Dani’s business acumen reminds the viewers of Bette’s undying passion for her work. Sophie follows Alice’s lead by pushing the boundaries of the television industry. In Generation Q, we see how lesbians in the process of growing up, like Finley, Dani, and Sophie, can glean guidance and inspiration from universal sapphic icons. This sends a powerful and necessary message to queer audiences.
The L Word: Generation Q Cast
I can already smell the comments: Why does it matter what age queer characters are? Log off and touch grass! Actually, I’ve been touching bushes for a while now, and I heard through the grapevine that threats to queer and trans health threaten our chance at living long lives. Queer people, especially our trans, Black, and Indigenous siblings, are vulnerable to violent hate crimes, diminishing access to quality healthcare, and housing insecurity, all of which lead to negative health and longevity outcomes. I’ve prepared a part of my heart to mourn the friends I may lose in our fight for safety and liberation. Our community, guided by an ancestral parade of drag queens and dykes taken from the world before they could grow old, deserve to see ourselves with gray hair and crow’s feet. Providing visibility to LGBTQ+ folks in their 50s, 60s, and beyond honors those who made history as police batons, social exclusion, and assault loomed over their heads. What are we fighting for if not an opportunity to experience the full arc of our lives? What are we hoping for if not a chance to grow old?
In these traumatizing social circumstances, filmmakers have a responsibility to advocate for queer longevity. They have the power to prove that time can be kind to gay people: Shane, Bette, and Alice’s friendship in The L Word testifies that we can age like fine wine beside our friends. We can live to send our kids off to college like Bette and Tina. We can grow into a doting father like Max, who maintains a handsome elf’s sharp features. The L Word is one of the few places where lesbians are deemed deserving of lighthearted futures.
As I wait for Netflix’s LGBTQ+ section to graduate high school, I’ll continue to watch films that remind me of the elegant lesbian I will someday become instead of the baby gay I once was. Viewers invested in the future of queer representation should keep their eyes peeled for the work of emerging LGBTQ+ filmmakers such as Sharik Geneve, Clementine Narcisse, and Natalie Jasmine Harris. Their work reveals how queerness intersects with age, race, gender, parenthood, and disability status.
Calling for increased media representation requires an awareness that the true work of honoring our queer elders happens offscreen and offline. No TV show could ever live up to the older lesbians I’ve met in real life, who contain sapphic escapades of Dionysian proportions. Seeing butch aunties wearing suits and ties, or gray-haired studs rocking cornrows and khaki shorts to the pool party, can make anyone a believer. I’ve created some of my most cherished connections with queer people and characters who have at least a few years on me. Their lives and timeless style—have you seen Bette Porter strut around a glass conference table in a power suit?—are proof that emerging from the closet is only the beginning of our stories. I can’t wait to grow old enough to show the next generation how much living, laughing, and loving takes place long after we are young.
