God help me after this I will never have a Thought about The Ultimatum: Queer Love ever again

How queers fail each other.

[Just a quick note before I start that if you have experienced intimate partner violence—physical or otherwise, with a partner of any gender—you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233. And here’s a list of international DV organizations and hotlines outside of the United States.]

[Also, this essay so long that I think some email providers will cut it off? You might have to go to Substack to read it in its entirety.]

The whole time my girlfriend and I have been watching TU:QL, we’ve had an ongoing joke about whose idea it was to start watching this dumb fucking thing in the first place. Technically, it was her, but to be fair she suggested it idly, and then suggested abandoning it after the first few episodes. But I have this terrible problem where I need to follow narratives I’m invested in to the end, even if they’re awful. Especially if they involve queer people.

This might seem counterintuitive, since I’ve also spent multiple essays lamenting the general boringness of these people and this show. (I have also told my girlfriend that if she ever refers to me as her “hell yeah” I am breaking up with her immediately and never looking back.) But I also found myself needing to see how the show’s story—not the casts’s, but the show’s sense of itself—evolved.