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
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.
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.
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