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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. Continue reading
