TV

Top 11 Lesbian/Bi Sidekicks

There’s nothing truer than the old adage “a hero is only as strong as her gay.”

From the early days of color comic strips to the current trend of on-demand television, some of our most beloved protagonists have been assisted by lesbian and bisexual sidekicks. Maybe help comes in the form of magic, technology, humor or even a strongly-worded note. Whatever the medium of assistance, you can be sure when you choose from the pool of queer women, you get the very best the accomplice business has to offer.

Here are 11 of our favorite lesbian and bisexual sidekicks – the kind of women you call when you need to move a dead body in the middle of the night. Or, you know, if you need some tutoring for your algebra homework.

Label her relationship with Peppermint Patty however you want (constant companion, girlfriend or pal), but bespectacled Peanuts know-it-all, Marcie, is absolutely a dyke – and one very best sidekicks a girl could hope to have.

Without encouragement and occasional reprimands from Marcie, Peppermint Patty would not have an academic hope in the world. She might be a great baseball player, but her classroom narcolepsy is fierce (not that you can blame her with all that “wahh wahh wahh waah” coming from the front of the room). Marcie always admonishes Peppermint Patty to try harder, be kinder, act her age. And when she inevitably falls short, Marcie is there to do her homework or let Peppermint Patty copy her social studies notes.

The only thing Marcie is better at than math is patience, which is good, because Peppermint Patty will have at least two college softball team flings before she finally settles down with her roommate, the Billie Jean King look-alike who loved her all along.

The beauty of BBC’s Dr. Who-spin-off, Torchwood, is the fluid way all the characters approach their sexuality. (Once you spend a week working with time rifts and aliens, wearing a label like “heterosexual” seems kind of ridiculous.) Early on in the series, super-genius Toshiko Sato finds herself falling in love for the first time with a woman – who ultimately turns out to be a creature from another planet. Some say that makes Tosh bisexual; others say it makes her trisexual. I say it makes her a little like her boss, Captain Jack Harkness: “He’ll shag anything if it’s gorgeous enough.”

From the moment Captain Jack rescues Tosh from prison, she becomes the most loyal member of the Torchwood team. Her ability to tap into any CCTV camera gives them visual access to every place in Cardiff. Her cool head and selflessness keeps time from splitting in half more than once. She even manages to infuse the living-dead Owen with purpose and hope.

Perhaps the most courageous thing of all about Tosh is that she’s the only Torchwood sidekick who never acts out or begs for recognition. Captain Jack won’t realize how important that is until next season, when he’s left with only Gwen and Ianto, fighting over the size of his wrist strap.

Sure, she was working undercover for Katchoo’s sister/arch-nemesis for nearly the entire run of Strangers in Paradise; and yes, she seduced Katchoo at a the most inopportune time; and OK, she did crack into Kat’s voicemail and erase the one message that could have kept Francine from marrying Brad – actually, Casey Femur may be the worst best sidekick ever.

Luckily for Katchoo, Casey’s heart overrode her job as an undercover Parker Girls emissary.

Through every breakup, makeup, drug binge, plane crash, hangover, gallery opening, sniper job and fertilization marathon, Casey pulled Katchoo to the surface – even when Kat would have preferred to drown. She could have been consumed with envy, but in the end Casey even helped stitch Fran and Kat back together, acquiescing to the fact that no one can disguise a three-story painting, and even the mob can’t obscure incandescent love.

The lesbian best friend of three straight women, there was a lot of stuff Alex Fisher didn’t understand – everlasting pregnancy, for example – but that didn’t stop her from playing the hero for all her straight pals in The Women.

After finding out that Mary’s (Meg Ryan) husband is cheating on her, Alex tracks down the mistress and immediately makes it known that the woman is “fine!” She locks it up in time to threaten the mistress (Eva Mendes), and then threaten her friends when she finds out they still haven’t told Mary: “What do you mean she doesn’t know? Put her in the vault! She’s not in the vault? You need to drag her ass into the vault!”

She patches her friends together when they fall apart, encourages Mary to work things out with the man that she loves and even saves the day by delivering a baby at the end of the film – even though she’s clearly confused about why the world needs more boys.

The most misleading tune of our collective youth is the Scooby-Doo theme song: Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you? We need some help from you now.

Scooby and Shaggy are tripped out on who-knows-what in the haunted castle; Fred and Daphne are up to you-know-what in the Mystery Machine. The person you need help from is Velma. In fact, if it weren’t for Velma’s super skills, the entire team would have been killed by a curmudgeonly old real estate agent dressed as a monster in the very first episode.

We’d like to think she was such a great sidekick because of her intellect, level-head, perseverance and sense of greater good. And while all those things are true, the other thing that made Velma such a good team member is the fact that she was single.

If Velma Dinkley had stumbled across a girlfriend on one her misadventures, she’d have bounced on the Mystery, Inc. crew faster than you can say, “Zoinks!”

If you’re a genetically-enhanced super-soldier, the thing you really need to make it through the day is a lesbian roommate whose motto is “no big dealio!” Original Cindy is one of the grounding forces in Max Guevara’s (Jessica Alba) life.

She not only provides emotional support and fashion tips about sequined tanks, Original Cindy also helps Max keep her cover as a courier for Jam Pony Express.

Original Cindy almost always talks about Original Cindy in the third person, and when things really get tough, she’s happy to cover Max’s trail: “By the way, some of those black-helicopter storm-trooper folks stopped by, asking about a transgenic teenage killing machine. I said you were out.”

It’s not a stretch to say that Patti is the catalyst for all the good change that comes into Frances’ life in Under the Tuscan Sun. After Frances’ heart-wrenching divorce, Patti gives her an “empty shell at the crossroads” speech and sends her off on a Gay And Away tour of Tuscany.

When Patti’s girlfriend leaves her, she decides to join her BFF in Italy, to help them both rebuild their lives.

Patti never complains about the bugs, never whines about the plumbing. She doesn’t even moan about being abandoned – barefoot and pregnant – in an unfamiliar country. Instead, she spends her time encouraging Frances to play the foreign field of older men, younger men, anyone man, so that she can begin feel alive again. Plus, Patti’s not above offering Frances an ass-cial (a facial for the ass).

When Patti tells Frances she refuses to ruin her love life, Frances simply replies, “Don’t be ridiculous, Patti. You are my love life.” Which is exactly what you call a really good sidekick.

The Jeffersonian Institute may be an operation with a whole lot of brains, but Angela Montenegro is the heart.

Her boss (and best friend), Dr. Temperance Brennan, is hyper-rational, myopic, and able to compartmentalize her emotions to an alarming degree, but that doesn’t stop Angela from pushing, pulling, nudging, tipping and even sometimes dragging Brennan to the place where she’s safe to feel.

When Brennan’s father was on trial for murdering an FBI agent, Angela was the only one who refused to testify against him. It landed her in jail for contempt. Brennan begged her to just tell the truth. “Sweetie,” Angela said, radiant as ever, even behind bars, “this is one of those times when I know what’s right and everybody else is confused.”

The Squint Squad is full of super-geniuses, everyone specializing in bones or flesh or guts or particulates – and then there’s Angela Montenegro, always drawing the face, bringing the humanity and working serious magic on her hologram machine.

With the exception of one really ill-advised stunt on the railing of the Chateau Marmont – a mistake she paid for a hundred-fold by being forced to haul a Whole Foods bag around L.A. until Jenny agreed to make her an indentured servant – Shane McCutcheon was easily the most affable sidekick in West Hollywood.

She couldn’t stay committed to a girlfriend for all the hair salons/photography studios in the world, but her loyalty to her friends was boundless.

Even with the perpetual cheating her friends engaged in, even with Jenny’s constant antagonizing, Shane managed somehow to never pick a side. From Bette’s adultery with the carpenter to Jenny’s blog/novel, Lez Girls, to Alice cheating with her doppelganger, Shane was able to forgive and help heal her friends before the first table was ever flipped over. Advice? She had it. Hugs? She had that too. Illegal substances? From Colorado cocktail to Alice B. Tokas, Shane was your girl.

After Jenny sabotaged Shane’s love life, threatened to destroy Bette and Tina, and stole her own film’s negative, our faithful WeHo sidekick still jumped in a pool to try to save her from drowning. Not even Sounder had enough allegiance left for that.

She may have started out as a doe-eyed, bookish sidekick, but Willow Rosenberg didn’t stay that way for long.

Willow was the beginning of a new order in Slayer history, in more ways than one. She befriended Buffy from nearly her first moment at Sunnydale High, and went on to test the theory that a Slayer should face the world alone.

When she wasn’t restoring souls and studying magic and protecting Buffy and erecting magical barriers, she actually managed to fall in love – with another witch.

You could argue that her turn as Dark Willow should push her further down the list of sidekicks, but at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s TV run, Willow did perform a spell to save the entire world. We’ll just call it a wash.

While there were plenty of questions surrounding Gabrielle’s relationship with Xena – Are they or aren’t they? Will they or won’t they? Do they already, and it’s just not on-screen? – the one thing everyone agreed on was this: Without Gabrielle, Xena the Warrior Princess would never have survived.

The Battling Bard of Potidaea could talk her way out of (or into) anything; her flair for dramatic storytelling saved them numerous times. She also learned stellar warrior skills, arming herself with an Amazon staff, and agreeing to fight for the greater good.

Together, she and Xena traveled the world, forging literally to hell and back again.

Their subtext was eclipsed only by the number of times Gabrielle saved Xena’s life, and in the end Lucy Lawless said it best: “They’re married, man.”

Because when you find a sidekick like Gabrielle, you want to make it permanent.

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