This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends!

There’s a particular phenomenon within lesbian pop culture that I’ve always been fascinated by. It’s this idea of ‘out of context’ lesbian couples, and by that I mean the practice of compiling all the scenes of lesbian couples on TV shows and uploading them to sites like YouTube. This method of consuming (and in a sense, creating) content is unique in that, by removing the non-lesbian context, the viewer is only required to engage with the plotlines that appeal to them specifically – everything else becomes superfluous. It’s a fascinating viewing practice that I think reveals something interesting about contemporary media consumption as well as the perpetually niche nature of sapphic fandom.

Scholar Frederik Dhaenens calls this editing process “queer cutting,” and notes that the act of arranging content in such a way works to extend and enlarge these queer storylines, which may be a relatively small part of the plot within the series itself. By compiling only the lesbian scenes from a particular series, this content then becomes consumable in a matter of hours, rather than over the course of several seasons as it might have existed in its original form.

An early example of this phenomenon occurred with soap operas. PepSi from the Spanish series Los Hombres del Paco was a popular couple in the late 2000s, as were Sophie and Sian from the long-standing British soap Coronation Street. Though it began over a decade ago, this trend hasn’t become any less common since then.

Specifically, a fairly large sapphic fandom surrounding various Latin American soaps has emerged in the last few years, with “Juliantina” from Amar A Muerte, “Flozmin” from Las Estrellas, and “Clarina” from Em Família being some of the most prominent examples. Though soap operas (especially of the international variety) have long been one of the most common genres of television watched in this way, any genre that depicts lesbians or sapphics is liable to be re-worked through this process of queer cutting. Procedural dramas (both of the medical and the crime genre) are especially amenable to such viewing practices, as couples like “Calzona” from Grey’s Anatomy or Gail and Holly from Rookie Blue have found large followings among YouTube users in particular. More recently, Casey and Izzie from the Netflix dramedy Atypical have gained a large following through YouTube videos. Even an already very queer show like Dickinson has been edited in such a way that now the show’s most significant Emily/Sue moments are available to view on YouTube in chronological order.

There are two sides to this story, of course: there’s production, and then there’s consumption. On the production side, there’s a lot of labor that goes into editing and uploading these videos. For Spanish-language or other non–English soaps, much of this labor involves the work of translation. Dedicated fans of couples like “Juliantina” and “Flozmin” would not only edit the series to include only the lesbian scenes, but they would also upload each video with English-language captions as well.¹ The labor done by these fans meant that couples such as these gained a huge international following, something that likely would not have happened otherwise. 

International copyright can often be problematic, so sometimes these videos would (and do) get removed from YouTube. In order to safeguard that content a lot of video creators will upload the videos to Dailymotion – where copyright is much less of an issue – instead. In other cases, the fans who edit and compile all of this lesbian content will upload every video to the file-sharing site Dropbox instead, for further safekeeping.²

For the fans who edit and upload these videos, there is a sense that they are engaging in this labor out of love for their chosen fan object, as well as a sense of devotion to the fandoms for which they consider themselves a part of. For the viewers who watch these videos, there is also a feeling of devotion at play, but perhaps with different connotations. One user who I spoke to on Reddit explained that they initially began watching these lesbian compilations on YouTube as part of their process of self-healing from internalized homophobia. Watching such a high volume of lesbian content (rather than the occasional lesbian scene that might pop up in an average show) was, as they put it, kind of like therapy for them. Such videos were especially compelling a decade or so ago, when there was less queer content on television than there is now. 

Now, this user says, they mainly watch these compilation videos because of their convenience – subscribing to every streaming service out there can be expensive these days. This notion of convenience is also connected to the function of accessibility in modern media consumption. For some viewers, watching these YouTube or Dailymotion videos is their only way of accessing these shows at all, because so many series still aren't available (legally, that is) outside the country in which they initially aired. In this way, an international system of viewership and fandom is created outside of standard systems of media production and consumption.

As the aforementioned Reddit user suggested, there is something wonderfully invigorating about having all of this content at one’s fingertips and being able to consume as much of it as you want. In some ways, these videos fulfill a similar purpose to that of fanfiction. They are a type of wish-fulfillment, allowing the viewer to consume only the exact content they want, with everything inessential cut away. Certainly there’s an element of hedonism here, but what would pop culture even be without hedonism? We want to watch things that make us feel good, and these videos allow that in an exceedingly concentrated form. 

There’s also the idea that these videos act as a sort of gateway towards watching the shows themselves. As another Reddit user put it, they initially watched Dickinson only through YouTube videos, but then decided they liked it enough to start watching the show in its entirety. To give a personal example, I probably started watching “Calzona” videos on YouTube about a decade ago, and I eventually became invested enough in them as a couple (and as individual characters) that I decided to actually start watching Grey’s Anatomy properly. 

This process reflects a type of conversation that is often had online regarding sapphic content on television. Should I actually watch this show, or should I just watch the lesbian clips on YouTube? Watching YouTube compilations can be a way of dipping one’s toes in the water, deciding if there’s enough there to get invested in. This thought process is especially prescient considering the number of lesbian relationships that have ended badly on television. For some viewers, it feels safer to wait and see how things play out before they give in to that emotional investment. 

There’s something especially queer about all of this, the sapphic nature of the actual content notwithstanding. There’s a sense of scrappiness here, in a literal sense – fans taking only the content they want to see and discarding the rest. I imagine these fans rolling out a sheet of cookie dough and cutting it out with a lesbian-shaped cookie cutter,³ leaving all the scraps behind. 

Scholar Stephanie M. Yeung calls these videos “fugitive representations,” and she maintains that YouTube has become an archive where such content, once peripheral, instead becomes central to these fans. As I discussed above, this archive is also somewhat tenuous due to various copyright issues, something that only adds to the “fugitive” nature of this content. This idea of being on the periphery of things also makes these videos, and the communities that form around them, feel special. The sense of being a part of something that only exists primarily because of a lot of fan labor – and is mostly invisible to the general public – has the effect of creating an especially passionate and close-knit fan community. 

The popularity of these videos within sapphic fandom also calls into question expected notions of value and quality in regards to pop culture. Most television viewers would probably claim to be drawn to a particular show because of various elements of the plot, the overall genre it falls into, or maybe certain characters (or actors) they find compelling. For sapphic viewers of these compilation videos, only the last reason rings true. The actual form (which includes both genre and plot) and the non-queer content of the series doesn’t matter all that much to viewers of these videos. As long as the lesbian couple in question is compelling, that’s all that counts.

For example, many “Juliantina” fans probably couldn’t describe the actual plot of Amar a Muerte – it involves a rather complicated story of reincarnation – despite having watched every scene involving Juliana and Valentina. I didn’t know the central premise of the mystical medical drama Saving Hope – which features the lesbian couple Maggie and Sydney, who I love – until I looked it up just now, as I was writing this article. For such fans, the value of these shows lies only in the strength of their lesbian storylines, and nowhere else. 

Quality also comes into question here. There’s a commonly held notion that soap operas are more melodramatic, or less realistic, than series of the non-soap variety. There are certainly formulaic reasons involving the expectations of genre that explain this assumption, but that doesn’t quite capture the experience of watching these shows, for queer and non-queer fans alike. In his wide-ranging book about the titular series, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, scholar Ien Ang proposes the term “emotional realism” to describe fans’ experience of watching their favorite soap. It's not that fans of a show like Dallas found the show to be exceedingly realistic, but rather that the show produced in them real feelings – feelings that they could relate to or produced in them a sense of aspiration. Having a relationship with the characters in a series also heightens this sense of emotional realism and the production of empathy in viewers.

For sapphic fans of soaps – or of other shows they might not otherwise watch – this type of emotional realism is key. The fact that some of these lesbian couples exist in soaps is, for the most part, irrelevant (or at the very least, not a deterrent to enjoyment). For fans of couples such as “Juliantina”, it's this sense of a “real” connection they feel to the couple, rather than the sometimes exaggerated storylines that surround them, that characterizes their love for the characters. Again, feeling this connection with content that one might not ordinarily encounter, and then finding others who have this same experience, is a large part of how and why fandoms are created. 

Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of consuming content in this way is the sense of cultural knowledge that these practices engender. Scholar Susan Driver⁴ calls this idea queer “cultural literacy,” and suggests that it has a lot to do with the creation of fan communities. And even if you’re not involved in fandom at all, there’s still a pleasurable sensibility that comes with understanding a niche cultural practice that in some ways isn’t even visible to the general public. While it’s certainly frustrating to feel invisible, there’s also something gratifying about having certain things that are just our own.

It’s also true that queer content is probably more accessible now than it has ever been before, but it’s apparent that there’s still something uniquely satisfying about seeking out content in this way. These videos seem to have some sort of ineffable pull to them; it’s a feeling that I feel like I’ve spent my entire academic and journalistic career trying to describe. If nothing else, such an investigation reveals that sometimes, these pop-cultural feelings evade definition entirely. Commence with the bingeing.