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. She shows up late to a shoot his boyiend anized, snappg at Stanford when he dar to exprs disappotment; she ignor Stanford’s new relatnship to whe about herself, promptg a rare nontatn (over bnch, natch) that don’t actually end wh her changg her issue wh Carrie’s treatment of Stanford isn’t that lacks realism; after all, the show was created by openly gay wrer and director Michael Patrick Kg, who, if he’s like many queer people, might have been on the receivg end of a siar dynamic wh a straight iend who se them as a sequed accsory. Still, this stale dynamic between a girl and her gay btie n be seen as a benchmark we’ve surpassed; today’s generatn of TV shows fally allow queer characters to occupy space beyond the gay bar or the Bergdorf’s drsg haven’t perfected the art of reprentg the queer experience onscreen—whe, cis narrativ still le the roost—but if Sex and the Cy premiered today, ’s likely Stanford would be ls “straight-om-central-stg gay guy” and more “actual human beg.