Our Favorite Queer Moments in Movies and TV – Thrillist

Sailors Uranus and Neptune in Sailor Moon

The girls, gays, and theys who tuned into Sailor Moon after school on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block know the ass-kicking girl power that Usagi and her piecemeal-assembled team of Sailor Guardians wield. (Sailor Moon in the middle of a good cry could beat any shonen protagonist; come fight me.) The gateway anime was funny, girly, tough—already ingratiating to a certain age group—and then Sailors Neptune, fighting with elegance, and Uranus, fighting with brilliance, were introduced into the fold in Season 3 and brought in a new gay dimension to the league of sailor scouts, most of whom could be read as bi, even if the English dub declared them as “cousins.” The effortless artist Michiru and the cool-as-hell androgynous Haruka, though, were clearly more than cousins, and even the tiny pea brain of a middle schooler like myself knew there was something deeply alluring about the duo. As time has passed, the nature of their relationship became more obvious (after all, they raised a baby Sailor Saturn as a throuple of moms with Sailor Pluto), and the newer TV adaptation, Sailor Moon Crystal, and Netflix’s rebooted movie, Sailor Moon Eternal, laid out all their subtextual queerness plainly for all weebs to see. But the original, even with just Michiru and Haruka’s shoulder touches and close faces, was special: They, and the other obviously non-straight characters the show brought in, were one of the first representations of queer love a kid could internalize, and even if Sailor Moon wouldn’t name it at the time, we all knew it was there.—LB