It’s indicative of the place Jill Gutowitz currently occupies in culture that Academy Award-winning writer Diablo Cody—known for Juno, Jennifer’s Body and a slew of other works—was the one to let Gutowitz know there was a Taylor Swift version of Wordle.
The morning we were set to talk about Gutowitz’s hilarious and engrossing memoir, Girls Can Kiss Now, Cody dropped the news via email the California-based writer.
“She knows that just from our interactions that that is a big topic for me. And she was like, ‘I got my Taylordle in two guesses this morning.’” Gutowitz said, with casual familiarity.
If you’re among Gutowitz’s 88,000 Twitter followers, this interaction makes sense. The writer and soon-to-be director of the upcoming short film The Ladies has called herself the “overlord of lesbian Twitter” for good reason (just look to her hyper-detailed fictional queer Coachella line-up that every year seems to capture every single segment of the cultural zeitgeist).
In Girls Can Kiss Now, which hits the shelves this week, Gutowitz brings her vast pop culture knowledge and sharp wit together on the page. For any of us who grew up online in the early 2000s, the result is a striking familiarity; her discussion of watching Orange Is the New Black on a laptop in a Starbucks for the first time feels like something that definitely happened to me and probably thousands of other 20- and 30-something queers out there.
The book is full of intimate anecdotes like that, from searching for porn on a childhood computer to having the FBI show up at her door because of an errant Game of Thrones tweet (you’ll have to read the book to know more), alongside Gutowitz’s nuanced dissection of pop culture specificity—like what the gayest celebrity paparazzi photos are, how oat milk is homosexual or which older female celebrities she wants to step on her in, like, a sex way.
Xtra spoke to Gutowitz about being too online, prestige lesbian dramas and loving our hot goth girlfriends.
Your book covers a lot of ground. If readers take away one thing from it, what should it be?
I feel like my book is two things: one part about pop culture, one part about my life. And so I feel like the the takeaway that I would want people to have is that queer women and people are widely regarded as cool now in a way that we haven’t been in the past. And that’s awesome. And we should keep celebrating that from a more personal and human level. Also that falling in love rocks, because it does.
Yeah, I was trying to describe the book to my girlfriend and I said it was like that part in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women where Jo March just says “women.”
That really is it. That should have been the cover.
You revisit a lot of pop culture moments throughout the book. Did you have a particular favourite thing that you revisited or rediscovered while you were writing?
Orange Is the New Black, probably. I mean, not that it’s not always top of mind for me (because it is). But I had written an essay for Time magazine about Orange Is the New Black a few years ago and the essay that I wrote about it in the book is kind of an elaboration on that, but with more of my own personal story involved. I felt like it was really fun to revisit that moment in my life where I was still scared to be streaming it openly around the people that I was around who were straight—one of whom was, like, homophobic pretty openly. And revisiting it was fun in that “cringe teenager” way where you’re like, “Oh, this was like, so sweet of you.” And also just so embarrassing.
As for other stuff I revisited, I did not expect to write about Entourage for my gay book. And also really doing that deep dive into Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronsen’s relationship, which is another thing that I thought that I was truly thinking of all the time and then I realized there was so much that I actually hadn’t known or maybe forgot about or repressed, so that was kind of fun.
How do you keep abreast of culture? What’s your routine for staying on top of everything that’s happening?
Twitter, unfortunately. I feel like I’m switching up what I’m consuming on Twitter all the time. I was at one point consuming solely pandemic doom, and then I said, “Alright, I gotta maybe mute some of these people for a little bit” and I would cheer up and then I would be like, “I want to know what’s going on,” you know?
So I feel like I’m always moving around. I really feel like I’ve learned a lot on Twitter, and have been able to consume perspectives that I just hadn’t in real life yet. As you know, Twitter is both good and evil. I feel like it’s extremely entertaining and also poor for your mental health. I get pretty much all of my pop culture and news updates and stuff from Twitter and Instagram, but I do prefer Twitter because it tends to be sharper and more of a biting commentary on whatever’s going on than Instagram.
A lot of young writers and creatives feel pressured to be “good at Twitter” in order to keep up. What advice do you have for them?
I have mixed feelings on this because, in many ways, Twitter has helped my career. It’s a really easy way for employers or anyone that you’re working with to look at your resumé and be like, “Oh, all these people co-sign and think that this person is funny or smart or whatever it is.” But I also fundamentally don’t believe in a follower count meaning anything about somebody’s brain or worth. I do think it can be a helpful tool, and I think as long as you can put as much energy in as you can without hurting your mental health, then that’s fine.
And I think it can be a fun exercise in some ways, like a good writing exercise. So my advice is to just always keep yourself sharp and commenting on stuff that’s going on—especially for people who want to write about pop culture or write for television or film or anything like that.
I think highlighting that balance is something that your book does really well, especially towards the end when you start writing about being in a relationship with somebody who’s a bit more “offline,” if you will. You write about the value of kind of logging off and being able to hold those two sides of yourself, the online and the offline, together.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s hard because it’s like, I don’t want to tell people to completely step away, you know, because it can be helpful, but it also has harmed my mental health in the past. I think investing too much emotionally in it is not a smart thing to do.
As a longtime fan of prestige lesbian dramas myself, one of my favourite sections of the book was where you write about why queers always want to get “stepped on” by older actresses like Rachel Weisz, Cate Blanchett or the like. Can you explain the phenomenon of getting stepped on and why it’s important to queer culture?
I feel like that kind of language has given queer people a kind of in-joke. It’s just a fun, funny language that we’ve all created together. It’s so funny to me, and it doesn’t get old for me, these expressions of violent desire. But, you know, like I mentioned in the book, I think it probably does come from a real place, maybe subconsciously. There’s like an element, I think, of queer shame involved with that. I’m like, “I should be squished like a little worm for my sexual desires.” Something that we are all in this day and age as queer people learning to do is how to be able to keep talking about this stuff, the hard stuff, but make it fun and take it back for ourselves a little. If I have to feel queer shame all the time and talk about overcoming it all the time, then I should also be able to ask Rachel Weisz to step on me.
Another thing that had me cackling was your list of everything that is gay. Why do you think we all love just pointing at things and saying, “Oat milk? It’s definitely gay”?
It’s a language we’ve all created together; it’s this queer canon of things that are not explicitly queer, whether it’s because people refuse to call them that and so we’re gonna call them that or things that queer people simply like to consume, like oat milk. I think that it’s another fun exercise for us to just be able to claim things. All of these things on my desk are now lesbian items.
Any new additions to the canon?
I mean, the introduction of Che Diaz [from And Just Like That…] into the world creates a whole new wormhole of queer canon items, like their DMs or their weed. For the lesbian canon specifically, many items from [the HBO TV show] Euphoria, like all the photos we have of Rue and Jules as like the Titanic. All those were really funny. Do you watch Euphoria?
Of course. I’m gay on the internet. I have to.
It is kind of required. It’s like one of the only queer shows worth watching right now. I mean, really, it’s a really easy show to make fun of. We need the funny stuff to carry us through. We need the Che Diaz and And Just Like That… to be able to have something to shit talk, which is a favourite queer pasttime.
What is on your personal pop culture wish list for the coming year or the coming decade? What are things that you would love to see happen?
I feel like there’s been a dip in sapphic movies. In 2017 and 2018, The Favourite came out and there was Disobedience [both notably featuring Rachel Weisz]—all this stuff that just felt so rich and emotional and horny—and I don’t feel like we’re getting a lot of that right now, for some reason. So I would say that on my wish list is more of that. It doesn’t have to be like Disobedience, like a horrifying repression story or anything, but something that really gets you emotionally. I want more love stories and more romantic stuff and also more dramas and movies like The Kids Are Alright. And even a rom-com like, Imagine Me & You, which my girlfriend and I were unfortunately watching again last night. I feel like there hasn’t been too many really good, funny, heartfelt movies about women falling in love or falling in love plus complications, so I guess I would like more of that.
Falling in love plus a little spitting in the mouth. The best of both worlds.
Something that the gays can talk about for years to come.
Speaking of falling in love, a key part of the book is your relationship with your girlfriend, who you lovingly refer to as a “hot goth girlfriend.” Tell me about the wonders of the hot goth GF.
Feeling judged by your hot goth girlfriend is a dynamic that still does it for me. I do feel like I have ruined her a little bit since she is online certainly more now but unfortunately, I am still more online. My interests in pop culture are nerdy in a way where they’re not super elevated. She has just objectively better taste in music and cool movies than me.
But I will continue trying to impress her and bring her over to the pop culture dark side a little bit. I do love when I can get her to pay attention to something that is truly so stupid on Twitter and then have her be like, “Well, whatever happened with bean dad?”
Do you think you’ll get her onboard with Taylor Swift Wordle?
That’s actually the one thing I can’t seem to convert her to; she really doesn’t like Taylor Swift and she won’t budge.
That’s true love, sticking around through all that.
I know, Swifty and an anti-Swifty. They said it couldn’t be done.
You wrote a book: What comes next?
So much of my adult life and career (or all of it) has been about writing about film and TV. And what I really want to do is write for film and TV. So to that end, hopefully, pivoting more towards writing the entertainment I want to see in the world.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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