The Rise of the Misery Lesbian in Pop Culture

Compared to the depressing brutality of other tropes, MLs enjoy the freedom to be absolutely miserable on their own terms. They reject the expectation that lesbian media should educate the masses or make the case that queer people are worthy of books, shows, and attention. MLs demand attention and don’t waste time catching anyone up on their lives, language, or identities—nor do they justify their choices. They do, however, feed into the convention that women simply can’t be happy together—but not because they’re lesbians or dykettes. MLs are unhappy because, at least on some level, they enjoy it.

Meanwhile, MLs are the drama. Sasha in Dykette, for example, pretty much is the problem—and she delights in the vicious cycles of gossip, desire, vanity, and manipulation that create even more problems.

The path to representation is often narrow and demanding. First, queer people show up to confirm the ideas of the majority or serve as a cautionary tale against straying from the norm, à la Bury Your Gays. Then there’s the respectable representation that attempts to convince the audience that marginalized people are worthy of sympathy and conditional acceptance (here, I shudder at Ellen Degeneres, now definitely miserable, and her “love is love” ethos). In 2023, we find ourselves in a pop culture moment in which queer and trans people are allowed to be messy, decadent, and richly flawed (although need I remind you that this grace does not extend politically). MLs are combative for a deliberate reason: They reject the usual path and force their audience to witness their full, complicated humanity.

In this way, the popularity of MLs is an encouraging sign. And while it’s possible this media is partially successful because it uses familiar queers-as-miserable tropes, it also reflects a demand for new types of misery. MLs stridently push past clichés and challenge the audience: Why shouldn’t they be the main characters, in all of their wretched glory?

But now, there’s an appetite in mainstream media for lesbian main characters who are not just grappling with ambient misery caused by random life circumstances or even external homophobia but are actually, gleefully bringing the suffering down upon themselves and others.

If a beach read is like eating a tasty little snack, reading Dykette was like huffing drugs: noxious and mildly euphoric.

Often in queer and lesbian media—that is, storytelling from inside the community—characters are made miserable by oppression and marginalization. Think of the melancholic ending in the historical romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire or the kind of conditions the characters on Pose navigate during the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s. The drama of these stories often centers around characters trying to find community and fulfillment within and in spite of these obstacles.

There is something refreshingly transgressive about MLs because they sidestep pretty much every queer trope with a breezy, offensive attitude.

Almost always, MLs seem, from the outside, to have it all: a wife or partner, a solid career, and limited exposure to bigotry. They have money but not morality (they believe that morals are for other people, certainly not them). They have the resources to change self-destructive patterns but they simply choose not to. Often, MLs are bored with the reality of dyke oppression. Instead, they are fascinated with performance, anecdotal asides on gender politics, and becoming their own worst enemy. MLs are intelligent, irreverent, and cruelly funny. They are, of course, a major departure from the kinds of queer dissatisfaction that used to show up on the periphery of hetero plots or even in other queer-centered stories.

The measure of meaningful cultural presence doesn’t always have to be joy. Maybe there’s power in being just as nasty as the straights.

Headshot of Sara Youngblood Gregory

Maybe you’ve seen her flirting with women just for the thrill of rejecting them. Maybe she’s viciously gossiping about the new neighbor but only because she secretly wants to f*ck her. Maybe she’s married but sulking about her life of comfortable domesticity. Meet the Misery Lesbian™ (yes, I’m coining the term), who isn’t so much a person as she is a phenomenon—and lately, she’s everywhere in pop culture.

Sara Youngblood Gregory is a lesbian journalist and writer. She is the author of THE POLYAMORY WORKBOOK and former staff writer for POPSUGAR. She covers sex, queerness, disability, culture, and wellness. Her work has been featured in Vice, Teen Vogue, HuffPost, Bustle, DAME, Cosmo, Jezebel, and many others. 



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Jenny Fran Davis’s Dykette, which came out in May and quickly polarized BookTok, featured the Misery Lesbian (henceforth known as MLs) of the summer. The novel, hailed as a “feat of femme angst” and a “queer zillennial comedy of manners,” follows Sasha and her partner Jesse as they embark on a 10-day vacation with two other queer couples in upstate New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s failed group sex attempts, vaguely feminist performance art, cheating, drunken arguments about oppression and identity, and a good helping of Twitter feuds. Sasha—with her commitment to being a self-proclaimed dykette, a catch-all term for campy, exaggerated femininity, self-destructive antics, and a generally obnoxious attitude—is usually at the center of all this drama, or at least she’s dying to be at its core. Even as a femme dyke, Sasha’s exact shtick is annoyingly elusive to me, which, after reading 300 pages of her internal monologue, is maybe the point. If a beach read is like eating a tasty little snack, reading Dykette was like huffing drugs: noxious and mildly euphoric.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, there were hardly any lesbians at all—only the classic Gay Best Friend, a man who exists solely to deliver sassy quips to a gaggle of straight women (Stanford Blatch, etc.). Then there was the Lesbian Best Friend spin-off, who is usually less cosmopolitan and more broke than her GBF counterpart but relevant to the heterosexual main character because she reinforces the idea that a roller-coaster life with a man is better than whatever she’s got going on. (Here, a moment of silence for long-suffering butch LBF Susie in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.) On the more tragic side, there was the Bury Your Gays trope, which basically demands that once any queer character is happily in love, one or both dies, implying that while queer people themselves are disposable, their misery is worth including. A recent example? The sudden death of Villanelle in BBC’s Killing Eve, happening just moments after lesbian love is acknowledged and requited.

If it sounds like I hate MLs, it’s because I actually do—probably as much as I love them. I can’t say that I know any in the flesh, but these characters are delicious in their own sweet-and-sour way. I devoured these books, watched all the shows and movies. I cried, texted my friends, and read through Twitter discussions. There is something refreshingly transgressive about MLs because they sidestep pretty much every queer trope with a breezy, offensive attitude.

For those of you who dine on lesbian pop culture as often as I do, you know that Sasha isn’t alone in her misery. MLs made their official entrance into the zeitgeist with 2022’s Tár, a film about the imploding life of famous conductor Lydia Tár, who goes from musical powerhouse to disgraced outcast because of her serial predatory affairs with young female musicians she’s supposed to mentor. Meanwhile, in Yellowjackets’ highly anticipated second season, adult Taissa, the survivor of a horrific plane crash in her teens, does a complete 180 from happily married, ultra-competent professional woman to a self-sabotaging disaster—to the point where she’s hitchhiking to reunite with her high school flame while her wife is in the hospital. Even binge-worthy reality shows like Netflix’s The Ultimatum: Queer Love stars villainous (or maybe just villainously edited) MLs, like Vanessa who became loathed for casually badmouthing her longtime partner. MLs are showing up everywhere in buzzy queer literature too: Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things features a miserable lesbian in taxidermy; Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby tells the story of a miserable lesbian mulling motherhood; Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea centers MLs in a horror story where one wife turns into a sea monster.