I AM JENNY SCHECTER, PLEASE LOVE ME

When The L Word first aired, I was in the middle of coming out, but I didn’t watch. I didn’t know yet that TV could be good. I think the thing about TV that I never connected to was that the characters were always so consistent, so themselves. I could never be consistent; I didn’t know how to respond to things, what to do with my face.

When I finally did watch, Jenny Schecter was the first TV character I witnessed moving through the world without a stable identity, engaged in the work of constructing a self. The surface similarities were compelling: Jenny was Jewish, also from one of the Midwest’s Jewish enclaves, also newly in Los Angeles trying to write fiction.

Jenny and I were prospective writers, and prospective lesbians, who came from communities that had formed us completely, under their safe gazes, communities that offered us a single, coherent model for who to be. In mine and Jenny’s Midwest of the 80s and 90s, it was community work, making the Jewish girl, keeping her in town, getting her married to a Jewish boy. Jenny and I had been very, very invested in, and we had to move far away in order to unmake ourselves, away from the eyes of those whom we’d disappoint for failing to return on those investments.

I always felt like an imposter as both a lesbian and a writer. I knew what I really was was a Jewish girl. There was one bad Jewish girl in the vegan restaurant where I worked. She had pink hair and piercings and was in a punk band. She was a rebel. But Jenny and I were not rebels; we just wanted to know our desires and follow them. We wanted selves.

Jenny allowed me to consider the possibility that a writer is a person in flux, a person who can’t accept the way of being that’s been handed to her, even if she doesn’t have another one yet. And Jenny is working. She is typing late in the living room, waking with her cheek smashed into books. And she’s fucking, which is part of her work, too, her life and her writing smushing together in a constant desperate process of self-making.

I needed Jenny. I was always the kind of girl who could only evolve by twinning.

 Joon Oluchi Lee, writing about Jenny Schecter in 2008 called Jenny  a “Brando femme,” meaning she was someone who just relaxed lazily into straight-seeming femininity, rather than working on becoming anything else—and deep-read Jenny’s Season 2 doily dress in a way that, for me at the time, only a couple years after I came out, felt like it gave me permission to be a dyke: “Jenny’s femininity is much like a doily: kinda whiny, her gaze in a perpetual, dreamy glaze, as if she wants to occupy a different timespace; kinda like a doll.”

 I started the process of coming out two years after graduating college, like Jenny, early enough not to feel my whole life was wasted in compulsory heterosexuality but still late enough to prompt a total epistemological crisis. I was a doily femme, too—dollish with Peter Pan collars and very intense girlface and glazey eyes and fashion that suggested a desire to time-jump. I played with my hair and uptalked and got called words like ditz and wrote in my little notebook.

My friend Martabel taught me the acronym LAG, Lesbian After Graduation, as an empowering reversal of LUG, Lesbian Until Graduation, a slightly derogatory acronym for the girls willing to experiment when it doesn’t count. LAGs have their own sets of issues though—we’re coming out when it has to count—it feels like we’ve missed the window for experimentation, for uncertainty, and there’s a push to declare who we are while we’re still in the process of figuring it out, following feeling in dark, swimming high on oxytocin. We’re earnest and committed to queer identity while we still have a straight girl’s fear of naming and pursuing our desires, a straight person’s archive of cultural references, and so we’re catching up on movies screened on our first girlfriends’ beds, listening to gifted playlists like homework.

There’s this period as a LAG where you don’t have queer friends yet and your straight friends think you’re in a temporary fugue state. My straight friends would call and ask, “So are you still a lesbian?” I’m queer, I’d insist, feeling like that identity was capacious enough to hold whatever I was becoming, plus it allowed me to foreground politics and avoid discussing this want—scary, bodily, embarrassing, coming from some pulsing, slimy inside place.  When friends visited me in my new gay life, they’d insist, “You don’t look like a lesbian,” and I’d see my dumb coquettish face and doily outfits and feel like maybe I wasn’t. But  Jenny made me feel okay about being a doll dyke, a doily femme, about having these movements, this voice of a haunted object-girl half broken by the patriarchy who is claiming dyke identity anyway.

Jenny and I were not just LAGs but the kind of LAGs who didn’t even take women’s studies in college or meet any queer people until we moved to the big city. Jenny sees lesbian sex for the first time when she moves to LA—she peeps through the gate next door and Shane is there, fucking a random blonde. It is as though, up until this moment of witness, queer people were mythological for Jenny.

I, too, had this moment of realizing queer people were real when I went to NYC and stayed in the bedroom of a lesbian. The lesbian was my friend’s roommate who was out of town, but I slept in her room with its (seriously) lavender walls and pinup calendar and queer poetry books and vibrated with desire—not desire for the girl, who I’d never seen, but for such a room of my own, for the possibility it represented for other ways of being, of loving. I stayed in New York and immediately moved into an apartment of lesbians. The first time I saw one of them make out with her girlfriend, I ran to my room and hyperventilated into my boyfriend’s chest. This is embarrassing, but it’s just to say that I know. I get how a single moment of seeing what could be otherwise, of seeing queerness from outside, as a deeply closeted person, can be totally upending. Lee Edelman said, queerness can never define an identity, it can only ever disturb one.

The lesbian sex Jenny witnesses disturbs Jenny. Jenny runs from her blond buckish fiancé Tim into the arms of Euro-vamp Marina, who seduces Jenny and then reveals that she has a wife, leaving Jenny in the world-smashing, identity-reconfiguring sex wake of her first lesbian experience all alone. In the course of their courtship, while gazing at Jenny in a totally interpolating, making-and-unmaking way, a way that literally brings Jenny into queer existence (you know Marina’s gaze has this power), Marina mocks Jenny’s engagement ring, essentially stripping Jenny of her entire symbolic order.

Jenny hasn’t just lost her fiancé, she’s lost the whole straight world, which contains her whole system of meaning-making, her whole language. I know that sounds dramatic, but what kind of straight people will forgive Jenny for abandoning a handsome blond boy, who is, in every classic way, a good guy in order to be a half-lesbian, which is to say, to be nothing? In her book Growing Sideways, the queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton writes that coming out is always a kind of death and rebirth: “the gay child is born at a “post-mortem” moment: “straight person dead, gay child now born… even, for example, at or after the age of twenty-five.” Jenny, then, is a twenty-five-year-old walking fetus, plus a ghost.

Appropriately, Jenny leaves heterosexuality behind in the desert—that space of imagined nothingness, which is also imagined possibility, where symbols collapse or are hallucinogenically transformed. The teen girl who picks Jenny up as she hitchhikes back from her abandoned wedding informs Jenny that the one lesbian she knew “totally died.” The consequences of slipping from straight meaning-making are potentially fatal. The thing is, we all know this. Lesbian-death-as-punishment is a familiar plot, and pulling it out as a threat feels like an acknowledgment in Season One that Jenny will be offered some kind of reversal of this plot, a lesbian survival story. It seems like The L Word’s audience, having recognized the promise implied in this early scene, would demand this.

But instead, Jenny witnesses a lesbian sex scene in her neighbor’s pool within the first 10 minutes of the entire L Word series and, basically, can’t look away for six whole seasons—Jenny just keeps gazing at this WeHo pool sex scene and then she DIES in this VERY SAME POOL six years later.

 Instead of being upset, the show’s queer and feminist fan base celebrated Jenny’s death. Lesbians marched at Pride in t-shirts that boasted I KILLED JENNY. In Daniel M. Lavery’s “fixed” version of The L Word on The Toast (RIP), he kills off Jenny before the series begins. As The L Word rebooted, Showtime posted fan reactions to the new series, including one that reads, grimly, “…as for Jenny Schecter I could care less if she’s still face down in Bette and Tina’s pool.”

Shane, in an act of midwifery, helps Jenny birth her queer self via the tenderest haircut, but when she later finds Jenny hacking at her thighs in the bathroom, Jenny is sent back to Chicago for inpatient treatment. While Jenny receives treatment, she is also expelled from her childhood home for being a lesbian, for still being “sick,” perverse, post-treatment. The straight world, if any part of her was still hanging onto it, has been ripped from her hands entirely.

What Jenny does return with is a top-tier literary agent—the mother of her psych hospital roommate. Jenny quickly rises to success and becomes egomaniacal, demanding, abusive, and thieving. Others have read this behavior as total abandonment of Jenny’s character on the part of the writers, but I choose to read it instead as a desperate grasping at legibility, at selfhood. Jenny’s new celebrity allows her to feel invulnerable, and, given how painful and lonely her vulnerability was, she holds on so tightly to this invulnerability that she becomes abusive to others, foreclosing intimacy and ensuring her further re-traumatization.

Mostly the audience loved to hate this new monster-Jenny—she justified their earlier hatred of regular Jenny. But, as a Jenny-twin, I can’t really figure out why Jenny was so hated originally. It surprises me that Jenny, as a survivor of sexual assault, garners so little empathy from The L Word’s queer audience. I can’t think of any other television character who we get to watch come to terms with sexual trauma and struggle with the formation of adult identity—especially queer adult identity—in its wake.

While other characters aren’t fully out in Season 1 either—Dana has a beard for professional reasons, Alice keeps insisting she’s “going back to men”—they seem gayer than Jenny. I suspect it’s Jenny’s seeming straightness that is part of the problem, but this is because of her LAG-iness. She’s been told who she is forever, and been constructed inside compulsory heterosexuality—a suburban Midwest Jewish one, which is particularly rigid. It doesn’t surprise me that Jenny’s Jewishness is missing from the conversation. The show kind of lazily hints at Jenny’s inherited trauma—her sexual assault flashbacks are layered with Jewish music. Mia Kirshner is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors—her father was born in a displaced person’s camp. I can’t help reading inherited violence and displacement in Jenny’s weird broken-doll voice and creepy stares. And a lot of what people dislike about Jenny is what people dislike about Jewish women. In her 2009 obituary for Jenny, my friend Gina Abelkop writes that Jenny embodies the “shrill hysteria, entitled arrogance, nagging, confused identity” that are stereotypical of Jewish women. But every time I start to think about the possibility of anti-Semitism as part of the cheering-on of Jenny’s death, it feels like a snake eating its tail. We didn’t know she was Jewish, my lesbian writing group tells me, workshopping a version of this essay, and I believe them, but I also start to think about the convenience of refusing to see the specificity of Jenny’s Jewishness, while hating the things about her that are coded Jewish. But then I start to feel like I’m being hysterical, nagging, confused. I feel like I’m probably over-identifying and all I really want is for the lesbians to love and embrace me.

What I can say more confidently is that so many queer people claim to want new ways of being, new worlds, but then they can’t handle the person losing their grip on the straight world, this person-in-flux, this person lost with desire, this person who has had her selfhood exploded open by queerness.

Two episodes into The L Word reboot, Generation Q, Bette’s press manager asks Bette about the skeletons in her closet (because Bette is now running for mayor, which, WHY, why can’t we just have Bette as a hot dyke art professor), and Bette reveals the official cause of Jenny Schecter’s death: “A friend of mine died by suicide on my property,” she says coldly. It feels awful. As Mia Kirshner, who played Jenny, tweeted, “That’s not the story that needs to be told about a survivor of sexual violence.”

I feel almost hurt when Bette, Alice, and Shane get together and never mention Jenny. I feel actual hurt when Shane unveils the name of her new bar, and instead of naming it after the dead lesbian who was her roommate, her bestie, and at one point, her lover, she names it Dana’s, after the show’s other dead lesbian, a fan favorite, but one with whom Shane never shared the same intimacy.

I want for The L Word to be the escapist lesbian fizzy candy it seems to be for everyone else, and it mostly is, but for me it’s also always going to be in part about who killed Jenny, and who is allowed to live in her stead. So far, the closest character to Jenny is Finley, who people keep calling the “new Shane,” but who is much messier and needier than Shane ever was, who, like Jenny, can’t handle her shit in LA and is heading back to a traumatizing religious family in the Midwest. And I wonder why the audience is so much more willing to embrace Finley than they were Jenny—is it because her dyke realness is not in question? Because Jesus is a more relatable god to have fuck you up? Because she’s more butch, doesn’t have haunted doll vibes?

I want to recall what, for me, is one of The L Word’s most moving scenes. In Season 2, Jenny invites her friends to a strip club. They’re uncomfortable and confused until a new stripper comes onstage: Yeshiva Girl. It’s of course, Jenny. To an absurd klezmer version of the L Word theme song, Jenny swaggers onstage in the dykiest outfit we’ve ever seen her in: a muscle tee, baggy jeans, hands in pockets. It’s her coming out moment—what femme doesn’t have a period of trying really hard to look gay? Men shout and jeer hyperbolically, everywhere. They look monstrous, more like the men in Jenny’s short stories than like real men in a real strip club. We’re entering Jenny’s art.

As Jenny removes her clothes, she chants the Shabbos candle prayer silently, in her head, Baruch atah adonai… until she is standing naked, arms in a vee, both victorious and vulnerable.

The scene is juxtaposed with scenes of Bette watching her father die. Bette has serious problems, real-person problems. Jenny is not a real person, though. Her problem is that she needs to become a real person.

This performance is an attempt at that: she needs to throw herself into the gazing maw of a hungry male crowd and prove to herself she’s still there, that she can resist their interpretation even as she embodies it. At the same time, the strip club stage is maybe the last place on earth appropriate or even possible for a Jewish girl to be. Jenny’s performance is unmaking the Jewish girl at the same time as it’s creating a new identity possibility.

“What the fuck is she doing?” Shane asks.

And that’s the thing. Jenny Schecter is inscrutable to everyone, including herself. When Jenny is asked if she is a lesbian, tears fill her eyes and she whispers, “I don’t know.” But even when she’s onstage, trying to tell her new community who she is, they can’t read her. And it’s her inscrutability, maybe, that’s the real cause of what people can’t handle about Jenny—the fact that Jenny feels most real when she is wandering the desert, roaming the city with her belongings in a trash bag. I want to feel like queers would have a space for trash-Jenny, for doily-Jenny (after all a doily is also just pretty trash). But instead, she remains metaphorically desert-bound, or trash-roaming until she grasps so hard at legibility, at consistency, that she becomes monstrous.