The Highs and Lows of Queer “Representation” in Sex and the City
Photos via HBO
2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture. Read more from the series here.
Twenty years after it went off the air, Sex and the City remains a landmark piece of television history, no matter how much its follow-up films and sequel series threaten to tarnish its reputation. If you didn’t watch the show on HBO in the 2000s, or play catch-up on a streaming service, you probably still know about the four iconic leads, who have since become character archetypes for countless shows about metropolitan women: There’s shoe-obsessed sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), uptight Upper East Side WASP Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), sexually liberated publicist Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), and no-nonsense lawyer Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon).
Orbiting the central foursome are a cavalcade of supporting characters — many of them boyfriends — and the fifth lady at the table, New York City herself. And, because the show takes place in the Big Apple, it inevitably deals with LGBTQ+ people, to varying degrees of success. In many ways, Sex and the City is responsible for the proliferation of the “gay best friend” trope, thanks to the fan love for Stanford Blatch, played by the late Willie Garson. On the other hand, this is the same series that gave us Carrie confidently declaring that bisexuality is “just a layover on the way to Gaytown.”
While much of Sex and the City may seem downright backwards in hindsight, the reality is that this quartet of women were having conversations about sexuality — queer and straight — that were almost never being had on TV at the time. (Then again, this wasn’t TV, this was HBO.) Given how far we’ve come, it’s easy — and myopic — to pooh-pooh the show for its often othering attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people. But despite all its missteps, the series remains a valuable artifact of late 1990s and early 2000s attitudes toward queerness. It was messy, but it went there. Unlike the echo chambers of today, Sex and the City was a brunch table where a wide range of opinions could be spoken, even when they were wrong.
To that end, I looked back at some of the best — and worst — times that the show tried to tackle gender and sexuality; and, often, they took place in the same damn episode. With the caution that we’ll necessarily have to discuss some queerphobic language and attitudes, let's begin!
Behind the Times: “Cock a Doodle-Do!”
Season 3, Episode 18 — October 15, 2000
Let’s get an easy one out of the way. When Samantha gets tired of her co-op, she moves to the up-and-coming (read: gentrifying) Meatpacking District, only to be kept up at night by a group of Black trans sex workers whose hooting and hollering she can hear from her bed. Though the show never uses this term directly, Samantha clearly lives near the historic 14th Street stretch called “The Stroll,” which was the subject of a documentary of the same name in 2023.
Unfortunately, the language used to talk about this conflict is unnecessarily dehumanizing; Carrie’s voiceover refers to the women as Samantha’s “friendly neighborhood pre-op transsexual hookers” and calls them “half man, half woman.” Later, Carrie even jokes that “Samantha always knew how to get her way with men, even when they were half women.” Samantha, likewise, refers to her neighborhood as “trendy by day” and “tranny by night.”
If I had to see the half glass full, I’d at least point out that Sex and the City acknowledges that Black trans women are part of the fabric of New York City, which is more than most contemporaneous television did. But let’s be clear: There’s really no salvaging this storyline, especially given the fact that Samantha threatens to call the cops on them, in addition to horrifically implying that she’ll go full Lorena Bobbitt on them if they don’t quiet down.
Ahead of Its Time: “Bay of Married Pigs”
Season 1, Episode 3 — June 21, 1998
Before the sequel series And Just Like That … transmogrified Miranda into a full member of the Alphabet Squad (and an alcoholic!), Sex and the City was aware that her decidedly unfeminine look would make her sexuality the subject of speculation. Such is the premise of this early episode, in which Miranda masquerades as a lesbian in order to get ahead at her law firm. (It’s not necessarily that they want her to be gay, they just want her to be non-single.)
Sex and the City often excelled when it focused not only on gender roles, but on issues of class politics. It’s a theme that later seasons — and the films — abandoned in service to shoe porn. But at a time when queerness was still thought of as morally wrong, the show presented Miranda as being willing to play LGBTQ+ to get ahead at her law firm.
That may not sound groundbreaking, but her storyline shines in the context of the entire episode. While Miranda is playing it gay in the B plot, the A plot mostly revolves around the feeling that, in heterosexual world, married people and single people are always “at war” — a gentle indictment of heteronormative hostility to any lifestyle outside of the procreation matrix.
The episode puts straightness under a microscope in a way that very few shows surrounding four heterosexual people were willing to do, which makes Miranda’s escapade into sapphic territory all the more satisfying.
Behind the Times: “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…”
Season 3, Episode 4 — June 25, 2000
If you’ve ever had a discussion with queer people who hate Sex and the City, this episode has most likely come up: the one where Carrie dates “a bisexual.” (Yes, Carrie uses it as a noun, not an adjective.) Some of the dialogue here is so cringe and biphobic that it seems to come straight from a 4chan message board: Carrie thinks it’s weird that her beau is “so open” about his bisexuality and sees it as normal. “Like, ‘Hi, I’m from Colorado!’ or something.” She says every bisexual man she dated in college “ended up with men.” When Samantha tries to defend bisexuality, Miranda says, “It’s not hot, he’s greedy!” (Oh, just you wait until you’re dating an NB, Miranda!) And later, Carrie even calls her date’s bisexuality “a lack of sexual orientation.” Eesh.
Part of the problem with Sex and the City’s penchant for trailblazing is that it’s often walking forward through a pitch-black touch tunnel, with the writers fumbling and grabbing for words and concepts that they don’t fully understand. That leads to episodes like “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…” in which the overall intent might be kinda-sorta good, but the impact is sorta-kinda bad. The biphobia of SATC is at least closer on the timeline to Newsweek’s now meme-worthy 1995 “Bisexuality” cover, as opposed to, say, the reboot of Will & Grace, which gave air to the view that bisexuality is fake… in 2020.
Part of me is tempted to say that parts of this episode are ahead of its time; it was probably revolutionary to see four women talk frankly about bisexuality on television in the year 2000. I’m also not someone who thinks that all fictional characters on TV need to be uber-progressive. Many of the attitudes toward bisexuality on display here not only reflect views of the time, they sadly reflect current attitudes toward being attracted to more than one gender. And the episode does ultimately try to frame Carrie as “an old fart” in her own words, positioning Samantha as the progressive one. But, ultimately, isn’t that the problem? Isn’t labeling bisexuality as futuristic or forward-thinking still othering it? Bisexuality isn’t a flying car; it’s like Adam-and-Eve type Garden of Eden stuff, people.
Ahead of Its Time: “La Douleur Exquise!”
Season 2, Episode 12 — August 22, 1999
SATC is often content to treat Stanford as the most extraneous of side characters. He rarely appears without Carrie and is treated more as a purse than a person. But in this episode, which explores various characters’ sexual kinks, Stanford takes center stage as he tries his hand at finding a sexual partner on the World Wide Web.
This episode is one of the first times that we see a more well-rounded version of fiction’s most famous gay best friend. Prior to his outing to meet his virtual friend “BigTool4U,” Stanford is mostly depicted as a sort of sexless sidekick — or at least someone who is not handsome or buff enough to participate in mainstream gay sexual culture. In small ways, this episode deals with a burgeoning norm in gay culture, specifically hookups that begin online and have to be translated to IRL encounters. In order to take part in the fun, Stanford has to face his own fears about his body and go into an underwear party. Anyone who has ventured into the wilds of Craigslist or Grindr can understand that fear — and for an episode that came out in the year 2000, the palpable tension of the scene feels like a triumph.
Behind the Times: “Evolution”
Season 2, Episode 11 — August 15, 1999
In one sense, this episode is ahead of the time: Although “Evolution” aired in 1999, it predicted the oncoming metrosexual craze, which began in earnest in the early 2000s with the rise of David Beckham and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. But in every other sense, the attitudes expressed here don’t pass the homophobia smell test. Charlotte begins dating Stephan, a pastry chef who lives in Chelsea and whose manicured presentation confounds her. “The gay straight man was a new strain of heterosexual male spawned in Manhattan as the result of overexposure to fashion, exotic cuisine, musical theater, and antique furniture,” Carrie says in a voiceover.
The entire episode frames peoples’ sexualities as a guessing game and positions effeminacy as an obstacle that straight women have to overcome. Because SATC also relies on some wonky voiceover transitions from scene to scene, we also get a B plot in which Samantha is said to have the “ego of a man trapped in the body of a woman.” Woof.
Ahead of Its Time: “The Cheating Curve”
Season 2, Episode 6 — July 11, 1999
I was once visiting a major American city and decided to go get drinks with a friend. He listed off some downtown bars, but said we should avoid one in particular because the local gays called it “the Zoo,” meaning that it was a popular Drag Race bar where straight people gathered to gawk at gays like they were behind plate glass.
That attitude is what makes “The Cheating Curve” a bit ahead of the time. SATC always struggles to discuss non-heterosexual sexuality — hell, sometimes it struggles with straight sex, too — but this episode is one of the few that punishes its central foursome for treating queer people as spectacles.
This episode finds Charlotte, frustrated with men, befriending a group of sapphic corporate ladder-climbers — or “power lesbians,” in popular parlance. Because SATC is, first and foremost, a show about women on the verge of late-stage capitalism, these monied, powerful ladies become de facto gurus to Charlotte. However, in a contrast to the Carrie-Stanford dynamic, this episode seems to cast Charlotte in a bad light for her tokenizing of queer women.
In an iconic scene, when Charlotte is confronted about her own sexuality before going on vacation with her new friends, the head lesbian reprimands her for trying to slither into their group. When Charlotte says she is not gay but loves “the female spirit,” she gets an infamous response: “Sweetheart, that’s all very nice, but if you’re not going to eat pussy, you’re not a dyke.” It’s probably asking too much for 1999 Sex and the City to recognize trans lesbians, but I’m asking!
Behind the Times: “The Cheating Curve”
Season 2, Episode 6 — July 11, 1999
Michael Patrick King giveth, Michael Patrick King taketh away. Sure, there’s a lot to admire in “The Cheating Curve,” but overall, it’s not some major win in the sapphic column. Hell, the fictional lesbian bars are called “G-Spot” and “The Love Tunnel.”
And, of course, just as its depictions of queer men are often more-than-borderline stereotypical, so too are its portrayals of queer women in New York City. Last time I checked, not every lesbian is a power-grabbing suit-wearing #GirlBoss. All of Charlotte’s new friends collect art, but the art is all about female bodies and being lesbian. They are nothing but their queerness.
Ahead of Its Time: “Defining Moments”
Season 4, Episode 3 — June 10, 2001
While some might peg Samantha as the sexually liberated member of the foursome — and she is — I’ve always thought of her as the group’s moral center. You might laugh, but it makes sense: Carrie has little to no ethics, Miranda’s god is the Almighty Dollar, and Charlotte’s inner compass points toward tradition, not truth.
Samantha mostly keeps the group honest. She doesn’t double speak and she doesn’t bow to outside societal pressure, either. That honesty serves her well as she dives into a relationship with a woman, Maria Reyes (S?nia Braga) in season four. Sex-obsessed Samantha has always eschewed serious relationships, so even the audience might be shocked that she decides to finally enter a relationship with a woman.
But SATC does a mostly fine job of showing the falling-in-love part of the relationship. Samantha has been open about having sexual encounters with women in the past, and the care the show puts into her first scenes with Maria features some great writing moments for Samantha and truly great acting moments for Kim Cattrall. A modern viewer might have the urge to label Samantha — heterosexual homoromantic, perhaps? — but for all of her talk about being fluid and open, Samantha is the only girl at the brunch table willing to put her heart where her mouth is.
Behind the Times: “What’s Sex Got to Do With It?” and “Ghost Town”
Season 4, Episodes 5 and 6 — June 17 and 24, 2001
While these regrettable moments don’t take place in the same episode, they do take place in the same storyline. Not every romance on Sex and the City is a Mr. Big-, Aidan-, or Steve-level affair. And while Samantha does seem to really care for Maria, unfortunately their relationship hits the skids pretty quickly, and in the most stereotypical way possible. Only one episode after getting together, Samantha is beginning to experience lesbian bed death, a stereotype so old Sappho probably chiseled a tablet about it.
*Mean Girls* wasn’t the only queer classic to come out 20 years ago.
Even worse is what the core friend group says about the relationship. When Samantha begins dating Maria, who is an artist at Charlotte’s gallery, the girls not only say some seriously lesbophobic stuff, they also pretty much sell their friend up the river. After learning that Samantha is dating a woman, Miranda says, “Oh I forgot to tell you, I’m a fire hydrant!” while Carrie quips, “Yeah, I’m a shoe!” Charlotte, who always disapproves of Samantha’s sexual openness says, “I don’t think she’s a lesbian, I think she just ran out of men.”
A hallmark of Sex and the City has always been its conviction that the central group are each other’s soulmates — and that men (or, in this case, Maria Reyes) are just people who come along to occupy their time. But as longtime viewers know, the show isn’t afraid to explore the conflicts that can bring a wedge between friends. No, the show doesn’t go as deep down that wormhole as, say, Girls, usually returning the core four to a comfortable status quo by episode’s end. But there are a handful of times when tensions between the group boil over. And dear reader, Sex and the City is not just a guide on how to be a bad friend to a queer person, but how to be a bad friend to anyone! Never tell anyone you’re a fire hydrant, especially a lesbian.
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Originally Appeared on them.
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