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All-Girls’ Camp: Playful Exaggeration of Lesbianism in “The L Word”

For some lesbians, watching the first season of The L Word felt a little like Jane Goodall observing chimpanzees in the wild: we saw similarities between us and the characters on the show, sure, but we definitely weren’t the same species. Not all of us are as thin, as idle, as lipstick as these characters; these women don’t accurately reflect the spectrum of lesbianism. Where are the true butches, for example? Where are the bois? Smart critiques have been made calling for the show to be more visually inclusive, more literally representative of lesbians. And this is understandable-The L Word is, after all, one of the few all-female ensemble casts and the first lesbian series on television. There’s a lot at stake.

Yet, while The L Word visually represents only a single slice of the lesbian population, it doesn’t damage lesbian visibility in the way those who criticize the show imply. The characters on the show aren’t meant to be literal embodiments of all lesbians, but caricatures of lesbian stereotypes, playful exaggerations of lesbian extremes: Bette (Jennifer Beals) is the type-A breadwinner; Tina (Laurel Holloman), the fertile housewife; Shane (Katherine Moennig), the sensitive stud; Dana (Erin Daniels), the dyke tennis player; Alice (Leisha Hailey), the quirky bisexual; Ivan (Kelly Lynch), the gentlemanly gender-bender.

These essentializing exaggerations-these distillations of each woman down to one overriding, campy trait-make it nearly impossible to read these characters literally. Instead of a direct representation of lesbians, The L Word loosens up the ideas of what is “lesbian,” and plays with dyke stereotypes to create a positive niche in primetime television that’s more inclusive than not. In fact, by using camp-the idea of highly stylized representations, of over-the-top humor, of fabulousness-The L Word creates an effective representation of “lesbian” for queer and non-queer viewers alike. Camp is used on The L Word throughout the season in various situations, but also in three major tropes, which I identify as the Lesbian Look, Dyke Drama, and the Connie Conspiracy. Because of the campiness of the show, The L Word can be seen as a positive move toward lesbian visibility.

Daily Camp

Camp is everywhere in the first season of The L Word. Consider the most literal examples of camp in the karaoke performance of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” in Kit’s video shoot with Snoop Dogg’s character “Slim Daddy,” in the drag king show at the Planet. These scenes are key in considering the series as a playful interpretation of real life. Likewise, the writers use common lesbian tropes to reflect and speak to real lesbians.

Take Dana’s relationship with her cat, Mr. Piddles: the stereotype is that lesbians are exceedingly bonded with their pets (of which they often have many). When Mr. Piddles dies, the L Word writers play this up by having Dana organize a funeral and bury him in a mahogany kitty-coffin. Not only is this a clever way to further Dana’s character, but a twisted representation of a classic lesbian stereotype.

Or consider the way The L Word plays with the straight male fantasy of having sex with lesbians: Jenny (Mia Kirshner) describes seeing Shane and another girl have sex during foreplay; Slim Daddy (Snoop Dogg) wonders out loud how hot Candace (Ion Overman) and Bette would be together; Bette and Tina bring a stranger home, trying to impregnate Tina. The show uses these tropes and others-prison sex (Bette and Candace), lesbian rape (Bette and Tina and, more complexly, Alice and Lisa)-to carve out a viable visibility for a lesbian audiences.

In addition to camping up these classic tropes, L Word writers use campy terms familiar to lesbian audiences like “gay-dar,” “stud,” “stone,” “Lesbian Bed Death,” and others. Harrison (Landy Cannon), Dana’s beard for tennis-related events, puts a new twist on the stale joke. He says, “It used to be, ‘What do lesbians bring on a second date?’ A moving van. Now it’s ‘What do lesbians bring on a second date?’ A turkey baster.”

And Bette, in uncharacteristic silliness, delivers a classic, equally familiar line during a conversation with Peggy Peabody (Holland Taylor):

PEGGY PEABODY: I was a lesbian in 1974.

BETTE: Just 1974?

PEGGY: Just 1974. That was all I needed.

BETTE: Well, you know, that is what we refer to as a “has-bian.”

Lesbian audiences will easily recognize this term for a woman who temporarily self-identifies as a lesbian, and then begins to sleep with men. With this campy moment and many others, The L Word works to acknowledge lesbian stereotypes and reshape them through camp to create a positive visibility for lesbians on primetime television.

The Lesbian Look

One of the major ways The L Word camps up lesbian life is through the Lesbian Look. In the pilot episode of The L Word, Shane enters the Planet wearing a thrift store button-down with cutoff sleeves, leather pants, greasy hair, lots of eyeliner and leather wristcuffs. Dana, not yet comfortable in her lesbian skin, complains, “Well, I wouldn’t be seen on the street with you. Every single thing about the way you’re dressed screams dyke.” Since one of the biggest ways lesbians identify each other, even self-identify, is through visual cues, The L Word rightly spends a significant amount of energy teasing apart the Lesbian Look.

For example, in trying to determine the sexual orientation of Lara (Lauren Lee Smith), the sous chef at Dana’s sports club, the women perform a campy information-gathering maneuver worthy of a Charlie’s Angels episode. Bette begins, “We are going to deploy a mission to ascertain the disposition and intent of one Miss Lara Perkins.” They pile out of a Mini-Cooper and fan out into the dining room equipped with high-tech gadgetry. Tina wears a trench coat and most of them wear sunglasses. They begin to document Lara’s look:

ALICE: [on the phone] Kitchen shoes. Neutral.

TINA: [whispering] Look at the earrings.

BETTE: Hoops. Hard to read.

BETTE: Well, she’s got some good lezzy points for her walk and the way she moves that chopping knife.

SHANE: But she’s way femmy on the coiffure tip.

ALICE: Yeah, and her reaction to the two of you kissing was split because she didn’t freak out—which was a good sign—but she hardly paid any attention.

TINA: But you guys, she’s got nine in the lez column and she only has seven in the straight.

Dyke Drama

Another classic trope camped up in The L Word is Dyke Drama—the stereotype that lesbian relationships have more drama than non-lesbian relationships, and that drama of the dyke kind can be particularly messy.

Early in the season Bette asks Tina at a party, “Have you ever noticed that every time Shane enters a room, someone leaves crying?” Shortly, the scene cuts to Shane’s ex-lover Lacey (Tammy Lynn Michaels) running out the front door, ranting; she’s angry because Shane hasn’t called her back. Later, Lacey follows Shane in her pickup, assaults Shane with her camera, hijacks a microphone at the Planet and leads the room in an anti-Shane chant and distributes fliers like wanted posters to warn other women against sleeping with Shane. Gabby, Alice’s ex-girlfriend, even says, “Looks like Shane finally tangled with the wrong crazy bitch.” But what does Shane do to protect herself from her psycho-stalker? Call the cops? Ask her friends to intervene? No, she has sex with Lacey one more time.

In later episodes, Shane starts having an affair with the married socialite Cherie Jaffe (Rosanna Arquette). Her husband nearly walks in on them the first time they have sex. After a series of close calls when it seems like Cherie’s husband is on to them, he unexpectedly asks Shane to date his daughter and then agrees to finance her own salon. Shane falls in love with Cherie, while Cherie’s daughter Clea (Samantha McLeod), of course, falls in love with Shane. The melodrama that follows—Cherie insists on increasingly risky sex; Clea witnesses her mother and Shane in a tender moment; Cherie won’t see Shane so Shane camps outside of her house in her pickup; the family gets a restraining order against Shane—are all campy turns-of-event that mock the dyke drama stereotype.

In an even more over-the-top example of Dyke Drama, Alice grows tired of her overly-attentive lesbian-identified boyfriend Lisa (Devon Gummersall) and brings home a totally straight fellow, Andrew, for sex. But Lisa shows up at her apartment and interrupts their moment:

ALICE: [To Lisa] OK. We weren’t doing anything, alright?

LISA: He represents everything that is wrong in the world and all you want to

do is have sex with him.

ANDREW: Hey, take it easy.

LISA: I don’t have to take it easy, alright pal? I’m her lesbian lover.

ANDREW: Whoa. It just got not-worth-it.

As Alice sees Andrew to the door he says, “Looks like you got your work cut out for you.” Alice replies, “Yeah, dyke drama. You know how it is.” And Andrew, in a superbly-written foil to this outrageous scene, smiles and says, “No.” By playing with this stereotype, the L Word writers reiterate the campy nature of the show and make it difficult for audiences to consider these storylines as literal representations of lesbian life.

The Connie Conspiracy

The third major trope used in The L Word is the idea that lesbians are actively recruiting straight-identified women as sexual partners—in a “Connie Conspiracy,” if you will (“connie” is slang for the term cunnilingus). This is most prominent in Marina’s seduction of Jenny who, despite her engagement to Tim, is wooed by Marina and actively seeks her out for sex. They become lovers and, by the end of the first season, Jenny is equally pursuing relationships with men and women.

The Connie Conspiracy is also furthered by Tina’s coming-out story (she was dating a man until she met Bette), which she tells to Jenny during their trip to the Dinah Shore weekend. Jenny says, “Tina, I didn’t know Bette was your first girlfriend,” and Tina replies, “Yeah, first, last and forever.”

The idea of the Connie Conspiracy especially plays out in Kit’s relationship with Ivan, who courts her with dogged chivalry. Even when she flat-out rejects Ivan’s advances, Ivan keeps trying to persuade Kit:

KIT: I’m a straight woman—a two-months-from-fifty-year lifetime heterosexual woman. If you were a man, you would be the perfect man. [Ivan smiles.] And I know that there are people who could be better for you and just give you what you’re looking for.

IVAN: Do you know what you’re looking for, Kit?

KIT: No. No. Not in the big-picture sense that you mean.

IVAN: Then how do you know I can’t give it to you?

In the culmination of this tension, Ivan sits Kit down on the hood of a car and lip-synchs Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” to her. Although Ivan’s advances have not yet been fully returned by the so-far straight Kit, spoilers for the second season hint that there may be more to come of their relationship.

Camp vs. the Real World

Prior to the series’ start in early 2004, The L Word was excitedly anticipated as the first show that focused primarily on lesbians. Critics and fans likened it to Showtime’s other gay hit, Queer as Folk, which carved out television space for gay men; they hoped The L Word would do the same for lesbians. Yet since the pilot aired, a slew of reviews pointed to a common viewer complaint that these glammed-up, financially charmed, LA-types aren’t representative of lesbian culture as we know it. They’re too skinny, too cheesy, too femme. Because many lesbians don’t see themselves literally portrayed in the main characters on screen, some lesbians see the show as less valid, as a less important achievement toward lesbian visibility

These critiques, however, set up unrealistic expectations for a television program and also ignore the positive possibilities of camp and drama. For contrast, it might help to briefly compare The L Word to another lesbian program on Showtime this year, Debra A. Wilson’s Butch Mystique.

In this hour-long documentary, Wilson interviews several lesbians who self-identify as “butch” and splices these narratives together to create a broad understanding of the term and its implications. Similarly to The L Word, this documentary is being praised as ground-breaking and gives much-needed visual representation to lesbians in a semi-mainstream media outlet in a way that hasn’t been done in the past. Yet unlike The L Word, Butch Mystique presents a literal representation of a specific group of lesbians, not a fictionalized, intentionally camped-up version of their lives. Thus, in critiquing this documentary, it would be unfair to fault it for neglecting to include characters that were universally representative of lesbians; it is called Butch Mystique, after all.

But why, then, is there a different set of expectations for The L Word? Why can’t the show’s creators amplify and play with lesbian stereotypes in order to achieve universal appeal? While Butch Mystique documents the literal lives of a small group of butch lesbians living in Oakland, California, The L Word presents a much wider scope of representation. Through the highly stylized exaggeration of The L Word, viewers must recognize the show as fiction. Because of camp, they are less likely to read these characters as absolute and more likely to find something with which to identify. The campy, exaggerated nature of The L Word is precisely where the show’s strength lies.

By giving characters on the first major lesbian television series thinner waists, better jobs, and more makeup than most of the community they’re meant to represent, this queer creation is camped up and invokes a long, radical tradition of queer camp. What’s more, by poking fun at lesbian stereotypes, L Word creators play into the campy feel of the show and invite more favorable critiques of the show’s significance. By using camp to reinvestigate classic lesbian tropes, The L Word challenges these stereotypes and creates a healthy, pro-lesbian space in primetime.

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