It’s Hot Girl Summer: Lesbian Edition!

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WEEKLY EXPLAINER

Lesbians: we’re supposedly the unfashionable, angry, cat-wrangling, Birkenstock-wearing faction of the LGBTQ2 cohort. We’re not the fun gays, or so the story goes.

But I’m here to tell you: you are wrong !

I’m Erica Lenti, a senior editor here at Xtra and resident millennial lesbian, and I want to make it known that us lesbos are having our moment. So put your visors on and get your U-Hauls ready. It’s Hot Girl Summer: Lesbian Edition, baby!

She’s just being Miley Queer ladies everywhere rejoiced when Miley Cyrus and her husband Liam Hemsworth announced their split last weekend. It seems Cyrus mourned the end of her marriage for about a minute before making out with Kaitlynn Carter, Brody Jenner’s ex, in Italy. She’s living her best life!

Some celeb mags report that Cyrus was “bored in bed” with ol’ Hemsworth — and if that’s true, we applaud her for hopping on the girl train to find a better lover. (Miley knows that queer women have more orgasms than straight women.)

She’s back, bitches Nobody asked to revive The L Word’s Jenny Schecter, arguably one of the most hated characters on television (she killed a dog, damnit!) — but here we are. Mia Kirshner, who portrayed Schecter until the series concluded in 2009, spilled the tea this week and says Jenny is still somehow alive. The real resurrection story: lesbians who miraculously survive drowning in a pool.

she’s not dead

— Mia Kirshner (@msmiakirshner) August 12, 2019

It’s unclear if Jenny will make a comeback in the L Word reboot, Generation Q, this December. But if she does, we have a lot of questions. Namely: where the hell has she been this whole time? Probably talking to the manatees at SeaWorld, right?

It’s a nice day for a gay wedding Earlier this month, model Cara Delevingne and actress Ashley Benson allegedly tied the knot . . . in a Las Vegas friendship ceremony. Yes, just two gal pals pledging their eternal love to one another because they’re such good friends. The two wore all black, and the ceremony was performed by none other than an Elvis impersonator (when in Vegas!). Couples who carry sex benches together stay together, I guess.

Hey Google, gimme some lesbians If you’ve ever googled “lesbian” (because, I don’t know, maybe you’re 14 and you really like that girl in your science class and she’s giving you lots of feelings and the only lesbian you know is Rosie O’Donnell), you know that you’re bound to see porn in abundance. And not just any ol’ porn — we’re talking manufactured, male gaze-y, girl-on-girl porn featuring a lot of rhinestone-encrusted nails.

Well, not anymore! After a Twitter campaign to improve search results for “lesbian,” Google tweaked its algorithm so that users see more educational content (like Wikipedia pages, for instance) in place of porn. This brings the search results for “lesbian” up to speed with “gay” and “trans,” which have displayed informational sites in favour of porn for years.

God bless Lesbian Jesus At this week’s Pride Summit, an event hosted by Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, everyone’s favourite lez pop star Hayley Kiyoko revealed that she didn’t always embrace the label “lesbian.” “I didn’t want a label at all, but once I released my music, there was this outpour[ing] of support for the fact that I did like girls,” Kiyoko explained. “I learned that by embracing my label as a lesbian, I was helping normalize that for so many other people.”

Whose label is it anyway? Like Kiyoko, our own writer Lauren Strapagiel struggled to find her way to “lesbian.” Her journey of self-discovery was compounded by the fact that fewer millennials and Gen Zers are using the label, favouring fluid terms like “queer” instead.

“I feel fiercely protective of the identity I worked so hard for. Not just because of its accuracy, but for the history, culture and community it represents,” Strapagiel writes. “Beyond the basic definitions, there’s a particular magic in being a straight-up dyke.” I believe in dyke magic!!!

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