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.
Just nine months before The L Word premiered January 18, 2004, cast members Kate Moennig and Erin Daniels huddled under a practically anonymous booth in the hot Palm Springs sun at The Dinah, the premiere queer women’s party of the early aughties. They were promoting a little-known show about lesbians for Showtime that was still going by its code name Earthlings.
The next time the actors attended the party, just a year later, they had to be escorted by a security team of ex-Navy Seals as they traversed a horde of sapphics vying for their autographs and a chance to bask in their presence. After being featured on an early episode of The L Word, The Dinah doubled in attendance. Everyone wanted to brush shoulders with the glitzy Hollywood lesbians.
“It was like Beatlemania,” Dinah founder Mariah Hanson tells Them. “They had the ‘it’ factor.”
It might have been their ‘it’ factor, or maybe it was the fact that Hollywood had never featured lesbians living, laughing, loving, fighting, and fucking in earnest on primetime. Twenty years ago, The L Word made queer television history, with hundreds of thousands of viewers tuning in every Sunday night. The show combined lesbian melodrama with explorations of LGBTQ+ political issues such as same-sex marriage, queer adoption, and the U.S. Military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy — not always seamlessly, but it certainly tried. It highlighted the interconnected nature of sapphic communities, spreading the joking stereotype that all queer women are each other’s exes long before it became a meme.
The L Word was in many ways the first of its kind, though this might be hard to imagine for a generation that has just witnessed the year of the lesbian, with pop icons like Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp, and Kehlani finally getting their flowers in the mainstream.
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Admittedly, the show was far from perfect. The original iteration of The L Word made some major blunders that have been dissected by fans, haters, and media scholars alike, including its blatant biphobia, transphobia, and overall lack of diversity given its primarily white, chiefly cisgender cast. The 2019 reboot The L Word: Generation Q attempted to right some of those wrongs but, despite its many mistakes and problematic plot points, the first run of the series still retains a vaunted place in sapphic history. There’s a direct through line from the 2004 premiere of The L Word to the 2009 founding of the queer website Autostraddle to The Ultimatum: Queer Love premiering on Netflix in 2022.
In order to fully understand the fervor and fever pitch excitement of that original moment, you just had to be there. And when I say there, I don’t just mean at the many unofficial watch parties hosted by historic lesbian bars, queer nonprofits, and other groups. You also have to hear a bit about what it meant to be an out lesbian in the landscape of 2004. Below, we speak to the people who remember where they were when season one of The L Word aired, and share photos of viewing parties from the mid-2000s.
Mariah Hanson, founder of The Dinah, a 33-year-old iconic queer women’s festival in Palm Springs
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Mariah Hanson, co-founder and producer of The Dinah, never knew that allowing a pair of actors to table at the festival for their little-known show would turn into a full-on sapphic moment in history. The L Word would go on to feature The Dinah in an episode, leading to an unprecedented spike in attendance at the queer women’s gathering the following year.
Tell me about the The L Word’s booth at The Dinah, back when the show was unknown.
We were approached by [a representative from Showtime]. She asked if we were willing to have a couple people from a new show whose working title was called The Earthlings — believe it or not — and would we be interested in giving them some time at The Dinah? She said, “It’s associated with Showtime.” I said, “Yeah, but those things cost.” We actually made them pay for a booth. Then guess who showed up to sit at that booth? Kate Moennig and Erin Daniels. Nobody knew who they were. They were pretty cute, but The Earthlings was just not a title that resonates whatsoever. We wanted Jennifer Beals. Then the show aired. We spent the next five or six years begging Kate to come back. We would pay her. That was a really funny beginning.
But it was exciting in the same way that The Dinah’s exciting. It’s this eye-opening experience, especially if you’re coming from Peoria, Illinois, because you don’t have that kind of freedom of expression in smaller towns and in areas where people are still afraid to come out. When you get to The Dinah, it’s this world that explodes. It’s just such a celebratory, ecstatic experience. It’s rapture for so many people, and The L Word was really similar to that. They reached millions of people where we were reaching thousands. Kudos to [them] for sharing that vision with the world, so that queer people can get closer to having the coming-out process be shorter and less painful.
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In the episode they ended up filming depicting The Dinah, do you feel like they did it justice?
Absolutely, because the casting crew had been to The Dinah so many times. Even the workup [to the trip in the episode] was this excitement and awe of The Dinah, and that’s how it is. After that, the cast would come to The Dinah a lot. I spent a lot of time with them. They used to do an event called Be Scene at The Dinah, and it would be Kate Moennig, Leisha Hailey, Jane Lynch, or Ilene Chaiken — they would judge scenes from The L Word that customers signed up to act out on stage. It was super fun. We did that for probably about three years.
My favorite moment during that was when the customer who was going to play Shane got too scared. She wouldn’t get on stage. There were three or four people in the scene, but Shane didn’t come on stage. So Leisha goes, “I’ll do it.” She played Shane as good as Kate played Shane. You really saw what a comedic brilliant actress she was, because she was Shane, she wasn’t Leisha anymore. It was so weird.
Did being mentioned on a show that got millions of eyes on it have any kind of impact on The Dinah?
We certainly had our largest Dinah we’ve ever had, because so many people went, “Oh my God, that’s real?” One of my favorite memories is being at a hotel, The Riviera, and the convention service manager had never worked The Dinah before. We’d been at this hotel for years, but she was new to the job, and she said, “I need you to come into my office.” She had this little TV set up and she goes, “I need you to watch this show with me and tell me how much of this is real.” And it was season one of The L Word, [the] Dinah Shore episode. I thought she was super cute in her effort to nail the event and the needs of our community. To watch that with this straight woman because she so wanted to get it right — that was just a wonderful moment in my career. It might’ve been the first time I saw that episode, but it was pretty cool. That’s how powerful it is.
Martha Manning, owner of The Wildrose, Seattle’s historic lesbian bar
About seven years before The L Word aired, patrons of The Wildrose gathered around a thick television screen to watch history unfold as Ellen Degeneres came out and kissed actress Laura Dern on national television. Fast forward to 2004, and owner Martha Manning quietly tended bar as customers glued their eyes to the same screen to watch yet another historic moment, The L Word season one airing live.
I would love to hear first what your personal impression was when you first saw it. Where were you at the bar? How was that experience for you?
It was exciting. It was fun to see something that was about lesbians. There were movies and indie books, but it just felt very new to have that. It was funny how they had different tropes as far as the bars, and obviously they hit some stereotypes and the characters, both hitting the mark and missing, too, in funny ways. But the whole thing was just really enjoyable because it existed and people really responded really well [at] the bar.
We were always very full for it. I think we definitely probably got to capacity, and you could hear a pin drop when the show was on. You couldn’t wash glasses, except for commercial breaks or breaks in action. It was pretty intense. People were very into it.
How do you feel like they did capturing the lesbian bar experience in their episodes versus the real deal, like at The Wildrose?
Everybody that worked [at The Wildrose] absolutely would watch and enjoy it, but we also had our fun with it, too. But we actually felt grateful to be able to be critical of something. Because there just wasn’t a lot of content at that time.
I am a little protective because we want nice things and we want to have more things. In no way do I mean to bash it. Being in the community and seeing behind the curtains or seeing things from behind the bar — I’ve owned it for 26 years or so — it’s a really interesting perspective. You see different people at their best and their worst. Because it’s the only [lesbian bar] we have. We’ve had weddings and anniversaries, and people have met there, and we’ve had memorials. It has encompassed a lot. [The L Word premiering] was just a big and important thing, and we had to show it. We had to have parties. It was all word of mouth, too. People just knew and they would come in for it.
Looking back after 20 years, do you feel like The L Word has affected lesbian representation more broadly?
It was a big deal. It broke through — again, for all of its faults and all of its success. It broke through and it was one of the first to do that. Its success allowed other things.
Then with COVID, [there was more conversation about] lesbian bars and representation because The Lesbian Bar project shone a light on what lesbian bars were going through. A lot of people didn’t know that there are only this many. That’s crazy. People come in all the time and they’re like, “We’re basically a lesbian pilgrimage.” They'll go to the different lesbian bars in the country and they’re like, “We just want to come in and get a drink or support.” And people do. All of these things [help.] The L Word had a part. It just all builds and all has impact and contributes to that. That's the progression that has kind of gotten us here, and continues along that path.
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Audrey Corley, owner of Boycott, Phoenix’s historic lesbian bar
In 2004, Audrey Corley watched The L Word for the first time, surrounded by queer friends and loved ones. The representation of community nightlife spaces in episodes set at The Planet — the show’s brick-and-mortar lesbian watering hole — inspired Corley to create a pop-up party that became Boycott, a one of the few remaining historic lesbian bars in the country.
What was your reaction to The L Word as it was airing?
When I first watched The L Word, I thought, “Oh my God, there’s lesbians like this?” It was 20 years ago and the representation for lesbians was pretty slim. When you had Bette and Tina come out and make that first kiss — and there were a million little wannabe Shanes running around at that time — that era just changed everything. It helped change a lot of things for lesbians. Gave that exposure. We couldn’t wait. We set our time for that night. Showtime was going to air. We would get together and watch it.
What was your impression of The L Word?
It was sexy. It was all the things that you were craving, and it was drama too, let’s be real. You lined up for the drama. But it was a good representation of lesbian relationships.
You mentioned that you were inspired in some ways by The L Word, so I'd love to hear more about that.
First The L Word, and then there was a pop-up event called Girl Bar. It came to Phoenix right about that same time The L Word was coming out, and I was like, “We could do this here.” That's what inspired Boycott.
Boycott is now a brick and mortar, but what was it in 2004?
We wanted an upscale event for women, and I made it non-smoking because you could still smoke in bars here in Phoenix at that time. Back in the day when you used to go to a lesbian bar, you would come out smelling like two packs of cigarettes. You just smoked them all day. It was crazy. It started off as a nice elevated party for women, and when we first started we had 400 to 500 people come out the first night. So I was like, “There’s a demand for this.” I just kept doing it and then 20 years later, here we are.
But to see those Hollywood lesbians that [The L Word] showed at The Abbey, which they based The Planet on — that just gave me a whole different dream of what we could have down here. That’s really what it was. When you saw that, you wanted a place like that. You felt like you were related to them. You felt like you were in their little friendships, too.
These responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
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