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11 Unintentionally Scary Lesbian TV Moments

In my seventh year of life, on Halloween morning, I pushed aside orange streamers to find that Dracula was driving my school bus. As I bolted back across my yard screaming at my sister to get off the bus – “It’s a trick! It’s a trick!” – I recognized an incontrovertible truth about myself: I am a coward.

Lesbians have long been portrayed as psychotic, axe-wielding sociopaths, so I’m sure there are a lot of purposefully terrifying lesbian TV moments; I just don’t know about any of them. I make my girlfriend answer the door on Halloween. I do not even watch scary movie previews. The sound of Robert Stack‘s voice is enough to keep me awake for days.

Therefore, this is a list of the most unintentionally scary lesbian and bisexual TV moments – the ones that send a shiver up your spine, make your blood run cold or, at the very least, cause you to throw something at the television.

These moments are innocuous at first glance, like orange streamers hanging from a door – but what’s inside is so much more sinister than a public-school bus driver.

11) South of Nowhere: Paula Carlin interprets the Torah. Homophobic Christians working from the first five books of the Old Testament are a terrifying lot. The Pentateuch is God’s tedious instruction manual for a select group of people, and it contains punishment instructions for offenses like growing two kinds of crops in the same field, or wearing polyblend fiber.

When Paula Carlin walks into her daughter’s room to find her milling around in her bra with notorious homosexual Ashley Davies, the Christian goes bananas. First, she shouts at Spencer to make it leave! But when she realizes the homosexual can hear and speak to her, she takes God’s 7,000-year-old laws into her own hands. Grabbing Ashley by the hair, Paula drags her from her house; we can’t see where they’re going. Is it going to be a simple matter of exile? Is she going to force her to the outskirts of Nowhere? Or, is Paul Carlin going to gather the elders from the neighborhood and stone the homosexual at the end of the street? Don’t look back, Ashley, you might turn to salt!

10) The O.C.: Marissa Cooper falls for a girl. The sage lesbians among us watched with trepidation as The O.C. introduced its lesbian storyline. If ever there was a character to trust with your heart, it was not Marissa Cooper. Her special gift was destroying the souls of the people with whom she had relationships. Ask Ryan Atwood. Or that crazy Oliver.

Our biggest fear was that Marissa’s foray into lesbianism was nothing more than a ratings stunt. And it was, so we were right, which isn’t unusual, but also proves that when we say be afraid, you should really be afraid.

9) Friends: Carol and Susan put lesbian heads everywhere in danger. If you watched Friends during the early ’90s, you are familiar with the law that required you to get your hair cut in the exact same style as Jennifer Aniston. Friends changed the way we deliver punch lines, the way we feel about smelly cats and, most especially, it changed the way we dress.

When Ross’ ex-wife Carol married her girlfriend Susan, it should have been a lovely, revolutionary moment on network television. Instead it was tarred by the sight of the brides’ hats, which caused an entire generation of lesbians to cry out in fear. If straight women were required by law to emulate Aniston’s hairstyle, would lesbians be forced to stuff their hair into Mary Poppins-style head pieces? Oh, the terror we felt! The horror we shouldered! The eerie music we heard: Listen, she’s calling to you. Feed the birds, tuppence a bag. Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag.

8) The L Word: Jenny Schecter gets a dog. Seeing Jenny Schecter in the car with a puppy violates the laws of nature. Puppies are innately joyful, peaceful and kind. Whereas Jenny Schecter – much like the Dementors in Harry Potter – exists to drive all happiness from your life, to make you feel as if you will never be cheerful again.

Good and Evil cannot coexist, so it stuck fear into the heart of any normal person to witness Darkness and Light driving down the street together in Season 4 of The L Word. Ilene Chaiken is not afraid to kill the beloved. You just know that dog is going to meet her demise at the hand of Sarah Schuster.

Goodbye, innocent Puppy. Please tell Dana we miss her.

7) Cashmere Mafia: The writers try to kill us all with cliché. Oh, the hopes we placed on the backs of the writers of the short-lived drama, Cashmere Mafia. There was to be a lesbian in a leading role: a remarkable woman both professionally and aesthetically. Cashmere Mafia would tell a new story on network television – one of your average, powerful lesbian!

Instead it told the same, tired story that everyone writes for lesbians.

Six episodes in, and we were rocking back and forth, chewing our nails, terrified that if a successful team of writers on a huge network like ABC couldn’t come up with anything new, we’d be destined for the rest of our lives to watch nothing but pregnant lesbians and faux-lesbians who go back to men. The notion is enough to scare even the least television-savvy queer.

6) The Suze Orman Show: Suze Orman destroys your dreams. Viewing Suze Orman’s “Can I Afford It?” segment is like watching the Ghost of Payments Yet to Come. The soundtrack should be the spine-chilling cry of your dreams as she stabs them over and over and over, laughing maniacally as she goes.

Whether it’s a new car, a house or your dream vacation, you watch hopelessly as a caller who makes more money and has more savings than you tells your dream to Suze Orman. She listens, then she sneers, then she rears her head and shouts: She doesn’t think so! You can’t afford it! You are denied!

In less than two minutes, you are lying in a sobbing heap on the floor – the world before you bleak and desolate, your best-laid plans put to waste!

Mere mortals are too weak to watch Suze Orman give money advice.

5) A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila: The show airs. Bisexual women are maybe the most underrepresented group in the media today. Lesbians have got their Ellen and their Portia and their Rachel Maddow. Gay guys have got their Neil Patrick Harris and their Lance Bass.

Bisexual women have long wondered when someone would come along to properly portray the normality of their lives. Finally, in 2007, one woman decided to fill the void, to make her voice heard, to rise up and say, “This is the life of a bisexual!”

That woman was Tila Tequila.

From around the globe, there came a collective, horror-stricken cry from lesbians and bisexuals everywhere. It sounded just like this: “Nooooooooooooooo!”

The truly scary part: Somewhere in Nebraska a young woman comes out as bisexual to her mother, and the only face her mom can put with the word is Tila Tequila. It’s one step forward for MTV, one giant leap backward for portrayals of bisexuals.

4) Grey’s Anatomy: Dr. Torres and Dr. Hahn emigrate. Question: What is scarier than facing down a hockey-masked, scissor-handed man wielding a chainsaw in a European hostel/torture chamber?

Answer: Falling in love – especially falling in love with a woman when you’ve been with men your whole life.

Callie’s fear when she seeks Bailey’s advice about having sex with Erica is hilarious, but as young Liz Lemon once said on 30 Rock: It’s funny because it’s true.

What if I’m horrible at all that stuff south of the border. ‘Cause I never been south of the border. With a female. I never even been over the northern mountains, if you know what I’m saying.
Falling in love is more than just terrifying; it’s also astonishing and exhilarating and intoxicating and sensational. But, yeah, mostly just terrifying. It’s why God invented processing: to keep the paralyzing fear from shutting down your nervous system.

3) The View: “Big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie attacks innocent, pure Christian Elisabeth.” The scariest part about the infamous Rosie vs. Hasselbeck quarrel of 2007 isn’t the actual arguing. The terrifying part is that if you watched it live, it was as if you had been engulfed in a cloud of nonsense where time had lost all meaning.

The five-minute segment lasted three days with Rosie saying things like, “I asked you a question!”

And Elisabeth Hasselbeck retorting, “I asked you a question.”

And Rosie saying, “You’re too cowardly to answer.”

And Hasselbeck going, “I’ll tell you what’s cowardly: asking a ‘rhetorical’ question.”

Finally, Joy Behar notices that it is next week. “Are there no commercials on this show?” she asks.

The arguing continues.

“Who is directing this show? Let’s go to commercial!” Behar says. “Let’s go to commercial!”

If she hadn’t broken the spell, we might still be in that trance, watching The Lesbian vs. The Republican until the end of time.

2) The L Word: Bette Porter reviews Lez Girls. After an entire day of being compared to the sexually predatory, emotionally abusive lothario “Bev,” Bette Porter settles into bed with a copy of the New York Times bestseller, Lez Girls.

As Bette flips violently through page after page of Jenny’sroman à clef, rabbits and chipmunks all over Southern California begin to take cover. Birds fly into windows as they try to escape. Then, from the blacker-than-black clouds that have formed above her house, Bette speaks:

F–k you, Jenny. This is complete and utter total f–king bulls–t. I wouldn’t say that. Never. That’s not even grammatically correct, you f–king idiot. You’re dead meat. You’re just dead f–king meat, Jenny Schecter.
If you know Bette at all, you are trembling, because it is likely – nay, probable – that Bette is going to murder Jenny with her bare hands.

1) Bad Girls: Helen Stewart leaves Larkhall – forever. There is no denying that Helen Stewart pulls some scary faces and barks some scary commands during her tenure at Larkhall, but the most terrifying moment in lesbian television comes when she walks away from the prison for the last time.

After telling Nikki to get on with her life and forget about her, Helen exits, and chances one last look up at Nikki’s cell window. Her face is chilling; it says what your heart refuses to believe: She’s really going to leave Nikki forever!

“Would it have been worth it, after all?” T.S. Eliot asks. “After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets / After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor- / And this, and so much more? -“

Would it have been worth the longing gazes, the loaded questions, the stolen embraces, the fights, the wounds, the prison breaks? If Helen leaves us (and Nikki) forever, would it have been worthwhile?

No! No, it would not! Helen, don’t go! Helen, come back!

Not heeding our (or Nikki’s) cries, Helen Stewart turns and leaves Larkhall for the last time. Never have more lesbians been so afraid that our world would never be the same.

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