Contents:
BEFORE STANFORD: MEET CARRIE BRADSHAW'S FIRST GAY BTIE
I never particularly intified wh any member of the show’s central, expertly iffed quartet—all thgs nsired, I’m more of a Steve moon, Magda risg—but even g of age the Girls generatn, was near impossible to pe the long shadow st by Carrie Bradshaw’s I grew up and began to grapple wh my sexualy, I realized I was even further afield of the Sex and the Cy gals than I’d thought; they were, wh very ocsnal exceptns, shg emblems of pulsory heterosexualy, and the show was part of a blarg set of societal msag tellg me I uldn’t have the life I saw onscreen unls I was fact, as I watched Carrie repeatedly overlook and disappot her “gay boyiend” (aka obligatory gay BFF) Stanford Blatch whout ever beg forced to reckon wh the realy of what she was dog, I was all the more torn. As I watched Carrie drag Stanford to parti between boyiends, ignore his problems, and blow him off om a big night out by tellg him that “tonight is jt the girls, ” I unwtgly absorbed the ia that beg gay meant beg siled om the real story.
The girls are openly skeptil when Samantha starts datg a woman, and male bisexualy is dismissed as “a layover on the way to Gaytown.
” Then, of urse, there’s the episo which Samantha wag an all-out war agast the trans women sex workers her is that one betifully aspiratnal, L Word–adjacent episo that se Charlotte get soped up by a posse of gallery-gog power lbians, but general, the dated sexual polics of Sex and the Cy were, as Salon wrer Thomas Rogers put 2010, “bad for the gays.