Tegan and Sara Found Their Root in Queer ’90s Movies – Thrillist
The new crop of gay TV shows and movies
Tegan: I’m watching the one on HBO, Irma Vep. That’s really great. There’s so much great queer stuff that’s happening and it’s so exciting.
Sara: This is going to sound really strange because we just participated in making a memoir and now a TV show about our high school years. But actually, a lot of the content I consume is not… it’s nothing against the genre, I haven’t watched any of these young queer shows. I’ve popped in and out, just to familiarize myself, but I find myself watching the more brainy, cerebral adult stuff, like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, just because I feel like my genre of watching is so much more tailored to that.
Tegan: And me too! But I definitely will say that it is really inspiring now making a queer youth TV show. Heartstopper was, I thought, so beautiful and well made. Sex Education blew my mind with how appealing it was to adults—
Sara: Yeah, Sex Education is a nice hybrid of when you have the adult story and the adjacent adolescent story. Those kinds of shows really appeal to me too because they remind me of shows that we would’ve watched with our parents when we were growing up, like My So-Called Life or Life Goes On. They’re slightly mature and they’re a little more sophisticated than shows for younger people, but they’re still within the realm of being interesting to both sets of people.
Tegan: Did you watch The Secret Life of College Girls? So fucking good, I loved that. And I will say, I think that show and Happiest Season too, some of these shows are still living in that world where they’re talking about being closeted and hiding your sexuality, which I know triggers some queer people because they’re just like, “Get over it, why are we still talking about that?” But lots of people are still closeted and are living in the shadows, if you will. And so I think that it’s still really cool to see those conversations happening.
This is going to seem real dense, but perhaps now my perspective has changed so much because of my experience making a TV show, but the TV shows for teens are written by adults. Again, to find the parallel to music, it’s the same as when people write off Harry Styles because his audience is young or writes off Billie Eilish because her audience is predominantly female. It’s absolutely the stupidest argument ever, it doesn’t make any sense. First of all, young people are amazing. And if young people like it, I don’t know—I was a rad young person. I liked really cool shit and I liked some shitty shit too, but I liked cool shit, so why not trust me? To me, teen shows have that too because they’re written by adults so you’re having adult thoughts and feelings and opinions and reflections in a show that’s aimed at kids. There’s the two layers, there’s two highways happening at the same time. I think it’s really cool, so fuck Sara.