2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture.
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.
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