Miranda Was Always Already Queer
As someone equally obsessed with queer representation and queer celebrity I should be elated that the Sex and The City universe is finally letting Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda openly explore her non-hetero desire and that she gets to do so with non-binary heartthrob Che, played by the absolute bi legend of Shondaland and beyond Sara Rameriz. I had to check in with myself and some fellow queers as to why the experience of Miranda’s coming out arc in And Just Like That is so cringe and not sweet relief or better yet, downright hot. Why isn’t this late in the game and graphic revelation about Miranda more welcome and swoon-worthy?
Sure, as many have noted the Che character leaves something to be desired. We were offered up a love interest whose stand up routine reads like a right wing word vomit parody of the left and whose main personality trait is getting high, which I guess is a fine match for Miranda’s clownish alcoholism. But still, I’ve been salaciously drawn to worse pairings on screen and off. Sure, it starts as an affair but that’s pretty standard. Even today most LGBTQ representation starts with a coming out story arc rather than giving us a chance to just see out queers live lives (in fact, this observation is also the most coherent point that Che themselves makes in their disaster of a comedy show). So no, It’s not the affair in and of itself. It’s the overall tenor of this newly romantic, starry-eyed and reckless Miranda that is undermining my own version of Miranda as already queer AND partnered with Steve.
Somehow this particular arc is sullying all of that meaningful labor of queering media consumption I did in my early 20’s instead of expanding upon it. Perhaps some of this is due to the the collapse of celebrity and character that makes me feel that Miranda was always, already queer. This doesn’t feel revelatory, it just feels sloppy and sad. And, if I’m perfectly honest, the other problem is that I love Steve. And although this is a common sentiment setting twitter ablaze, I love Steve specifically as a partner for an out and proud bisexual Miranda. And that is already the place he held for me without him ever needing to mumble a word about it.
Queer millennials and our elder gays and bis honed the skills of reading and embracing fictional characters as queer even when television shows, movies, and even novels were not yet ready to fully offer them up. We took the media’s queerbaiting, sweep’s week girl/girl kisses and all, and created vivid alternate universes. We were given eccentric best friends, tomboys, unexplained roommates, unmarried bookish great aunts, musical theater nerds. If we wanted out-and-proud we got our moments as long as they were aliens, vampires or other mythical beings.
As a kid I was raised on John Hughes films where we could see ourselves reflected, and more often than not, rejected, in the Duckies and the Wattses. But even twenty years after the brat pack, a movie called High School Musical of all things couldn’t even give us all-the-way-gay. Still, in our lucid moments, LGBTQ viewers knew we were reflected in the most entertaining, nuanced and spectacular characters on screen. In the land before Glee, there were local Rocky Horror productions to attend as tweens and by college we had that one But I’m a Cheerleader DVD we all passed around in between watching weekly screenings of Sex and the City. But why did marxist loving baby queers watch hetero capitalists teeter around a product placement laden manhattan following the scent of toxic masculinity like it was cat nip? For me, there was one main answer, Miranda. She was one of us. She always felt more like a grumpy tenure-seeking gender studies professor than an attorney. And Steve, he was not like the other men. Steve has big dyke energy.
Sex and the City never did non-hetero well
When the original Sex and the City occasionally tried to pop its own hetero framework, it offered up a sort of afterschool special take on non-heterosexual identities. Before we had Black Charlotte (that deserves it’s own article) we had a gaggle of Lesbian Charlottes. With the exception of “trysexual” Samantha’s relationship with hot brazilian artist Maria, SATC was so incapable of really exploring gay sex or romance that they went as far as having the only two recurring gay characters wed despite sharing nothing in common but a sexual identity and love for high maintenance, narcissistic straight girls.
And, as all media obsessed bisexuals, and our handful of allies, remember there was the episode when Carrie discovers Sean, one of the only decent human males she comes across, is bisexual. While the show half-assedly painted Carrie’s bigotry as the “real” problem, like Ally Mcbeal before her, Carrie finds his bisexuality to be a pretty obvious deal-breaker. Sometimes you just have to wonder how Carrie who is, for lack of a better word, prudish, became a sex writer in the first place when she knows so little about the topic beyond her own surface observations of wealthy white heterosexual Manhattanites rather transactional world of dating and sex. Her cooch-gazing worldview is only as expandable as the next irresistible pun allows.
That time Miranda tried Lesbian
In the first season, they openly address Miranda’s sapphic vibes using a questionable but oft-repeated plotline where a straight person unintentionally passes as gay and then continues to play along in order to receive some kind of social or literal capital. In this case, it was her coworker and previously indifferent boss who she was trying to win over by dating a butch from the company softball league. She enjoys the charade so much that she goes in for a smooch only to swiftly announce that she is not a lesbian. Then she proceeds to be a total lesbian for several more seasons of the show. And I loved it. When Cynthia Nixon came out in real life — it didn’t feel like news since we were already chanting “one of us, one of us, gobble, gooble, we accept you” under our breath for years.
At no point in that queerbaiting episode did I expect 1999 Miranda to come out. I knew that they wouldn’t actually make one of the 4 “girlfriends” gay. So I had a feeling of sweet relief when that plotline was sorted and she goes back to wearing overalls and ribbed tanks to brunch, sharp blazers for a night out on the town or dusting off a nice ascot for that important trial. Miranda was already so queer-coded by her fashion and her grumpy feminist sentiment she might as well have been reminiscing about her first indigo girls concert when she was actually talking about her first BJ. She was the sole character giving SATC a chance to pass the Bechdel test. In a show about female friendship they were always just talking about men, an issue Miranda often bemoaned. And now, just like that, we are meant to believe she was also a delusional romantic who just hadn’t found her Mr. (or Mx) Big yet?
In defense of Steve
Looking back, she was most settled in my queer imaginary, not in spite of, but because of her LTR with Steve. Steve is exactly the kind of man a bisexual dyke like Miranda (my definition, not hers) could successfully partner with long term. Their relationship does not fit within heteronormative expectations of gender roles and dynamics and it never did. And, because of that, I want to come to Steve’s defense and set the record queer, on the whole kitchen sex debacle.
Steve knows how to F*&K with his hands and you can not convince me otherwise. And don’t say finger, they are not in 8th grade. Che and Miranda had sex, full sex, not a base on the hetero ball park metaphor and sex writer Carrie should know this. Now I hate to speak poorly of the dead, even the fictionally mourned, but I assume Big (and likely Noth) had no idea what to do to please a woman aside getting his Mr. wet but I refuse to believe the same of Steve. Miranda had most certainly trained him up. Yes, he choked when she was trying to make him perform the play by play of her bad friend affair sex with Che, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t in his skill set. Steve is a pleaser. He can take care of business.
So, that’s it, I’m team Steve. I don’t believe he’s selfish in bed or elsewhere, I think Che is all about the chase and I just can’t watch Miranda show her Meg Ryan side any longer. When Charlotte accuses Miranda of “not being progressive enough” to follow through with Che it feels more like an acknowledgement on behalf of the show itself as not progressive enough to address queer relationships or sexual or gender minorities with any finesse. It feels weird to admit I liked it better when I was using my queer imagination to claim Miranda and Steve as a mixed orientation (bi/straight) relationship under the rainbow than watching this fictional world unravel in its attempts to undo all of it’s past wrongs. And Just Like That still inevitably centers the experience of rich, straight, cis white ladies even if each is sent out to find a POC bestie or love interest. If AJLT wanted to actually expand its myopic world, Che could be the new Samantha and we could delve into a queer Brooklyn to see their exploits instead of putting us all through Miranda’s undoing. Maybe some things are better left un-rebooted, even if the boots are Louboutin. Sorry for that, the show has that power.
