This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends! FYI, there is now a Substack app that you can read my newsletter in if you so choose. See here.

Sometimes, pop culture can change our lives. And sometimes, it can hurt us in ways we’re still reckoning with years down the line. This is the complicated nature of most forms of media, and it’s also the focus of Jill Gutowitz’s new book, Girls Can Kiss Now. From a woman who has been known to call herself the “self-proclaimed overlord of lesbian Twitter,” Girls Can Kiss Now is, essentially, a memoir told through the lens of pop culture. Gutowitz outlines her changing relationship to pop culture, from the time when she was fourteen and everyone was obsessed with Entourage, to the earth-shattering moment when she first discovered Orange Is The New Black. 

It’s Gutowitz’s presumption that pop culture is a lens through which we view the world, and that these lenses change over time. Girls Can Kiss Now is about both the joys and the pain of pop culture, and how both these experiences shape us into who we are today. It’s also, in a very real sense, about trauma, and not in a glib, Jamie Lee Curtis press tour kind of way. As Gutowitz suggests in the book, so much of how we grow up is influenced by the messages we consume as young people, and many of these messages come from pop culture. 

Girls Can Kiss Now looks at how pop culture has changed over time. The introduction of the book lays out the “five eras of celesbianism” – from “The Scrubbing” to the “Mainstreaming” – to give readers a general sense of how we might consider the evolution of lesbians in pop culture. But, while the book contains several explanatory, humorous moments like this, it doesn’t function as a history book, nor does it look at current events from an “objective” perspective.

One way to write a book like this would be to speak in broad, general terms, discussing the impact various pieces of pop culture have had on “the community” at large. The problem with this type of writing is that it can have the effect of feeling too impersonal or unduly universal. What Gutowitz does here instead is brings these ideas down to a macro scale. Sure, Orange Is The New Black was a broadly “important” show, but what does that mean, really? 

Gutowitz answers that question for us. We learn that the show came out around the time she was first beginning to suspect she was queer. We’re told of the time Gutowitz, remembering the show had just premiered, opened her laptop to watch it in a coffee shop, only to smash it shut in embarrassment when there was lesbian sex on screen only seconds into the first episode. For Gutowitz, the show was an important part of her coming-out process.

As a means to illustrate the themes of the book, Gutowitz tracks her own relationship with the internet and pop culture over time. In the first chapter of the book, she takes us from the day her dad brought home one of the earliest versions of a laptop in the ‘90s, to the time in 2018 when the FBI came to her door because she tweeted a vaguely threatening meme. 

Discussing the contentious idea that certain celebrities like Taylor Swift are secretly gay, Gutowitz traces one of her earliest memories of queerness on screen – when Eliza Dushku gets called a dyke in Bring It On – to the horrific era of pop culture when Perez Hilton made a sport out of outing closeted gay celebs. These two examples have thoroughly different connotations, Gutowitz argues, because calling someone gay has a totally different meaning than it did 10 or 15 years ago, and queer people’s relationship with pop culture has also changed significantly since then. 

Gutowitz also explores various ineffable concepts that are important to the lesbian and sapphic community, such as the concept of yearning. While discussing her first real experience of lesbian yearning – which, looking back, was actually quite devastating – Gutowitz considers how so many lesbian movies are about yearning, and how so many of them end badly. She explores how her consumption of romances - both of the straight and the queer variety – influenced her perception about yearning and its place within queer culture. One message you might take from all this content is the idea that all we deserve, as queer people, is to yearn. This idea is baked into pop culture more broadly, and, as Gutowitz highlights, this “script” convinced her that she could never actually have the things she wanted. 

Examples like these are central to the success of the book as both a memoir and a reflective look at pop culture. Rather than framing these pop cultural moments in broad, universal terms of representation, Gutowitz connects them to her own experience, deftly illustrating how intrinsic pop culture was (and is) to the ways in which we understand and move about the world. Certainly, there are moments where Gutowitz speaks in more universal terms – the chapter where she compiles an extensive list of all the things that are “lesbian canon,” for example – but these are light, amusing observations that emphasize Gutowitz’s talent as a humorist and don’t clash with the more personal moments in the book. Indeed, chapters such as these actually make more sense when placed within the context of the book as a whole, as readers come to realize the effort and the self-healing it has taken Gutowitz to get to the point where she can make jokes like these.

The threads that Gutowitz has pulled from various moments in pop culture – and her exploration about how these pieces of media have affected her personally – all come together in one of the last chapters of the book, where she writes a letter to her younger self. By courageously sharing one of the most traumatic moments of her life with readers, it adds so much more depth to everything else that has come before it. It’s also a moment of forgiveness for Gutowitz’s younger self. It’s as if Gutowitz is asking, what would have happened if I had known what I know now? It’s an impossible question to answer, of course, and it’s not necessarily one that is likely to bring about much closure. 

But, as she notes in the introduction, in many ways this book was a tool for Gutowitz to start healing herself, and one of the necessities in this process is forgiveness. By looking at her life through the lens of pop culture and reflecting from a place of wisdom, Gutowitz is now able to forgive her younger self for the messages she internalized and how they may have played out in her life. It’s a compelling project for a memoir, especially one that, on its surface, doesn’t appear to be a memoir at all. (Technically, the book is billed as a collection of essays.)

Without Gutowitz’s intimate, and yes, brave, insights about her own life, the book wouldn’t have the same depth as it does, funny and irreverent as it also is. By sharing a part of herself with us, Gutowitz is able to explore the themes of the book more fully, and with more distinction. In setting her younger self free from blame, she also illustrates the importance of having the language to be able to speak about your experiences on your own terms, something that can be greatly influenced by what you see in the media.

In many ways, while the book is in some sense a love letter to pop culture, it’s also Gutowitz’s love letter to herself, and to her girlfriend, Emma. Near the end of the book, Gutowitz reflects on her relationship with Emma, as well as her relationship with her best friend, Sam. Looking back on a date they once had, Gutowitz comes to the realization that one’s proximity to pop culture – something she valued very highly when she first moved to LA – is not the most important thing in life, but rather, one’s relationship with other people is. Essentially, being famous doesn’t matter if you already have someone special to share your life with.

The revelation that her girlfriend is the most meaningful thing in her life might seem like an odd conclusion for a book about pop culture to end on, but really, it’s quite fitting. At its best, pop culture can entertain us, allow us to understand ourselves better, and even bring us closer to other people. And while it doesn’t always do this – as Gutowitz so clearly illustrates – that capacity is always there. And that’s what it’s all about, right?

You can purchase Girls Can Kiss Now at Bookshop or at your local independent bookstore.

Leave a comment