Review: "So Gay for You" by Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig

So Gay for You by Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig
Published June 2025 via St. Martin's
★★★★

Back in the early 2000s, Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig—unknowns trying to break into Hollywood—both showed up for an audition. They clicked. Moennig got the part...but the writers worked Hailey into the show as well, and a friendship—to say nothing of a hella memorable show—was born.

Every day, between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m., one of us calls the other for a morning check-in. Like clockwork, my wife[...] will hand me the phone and say, without a hint of resentment, not even looking up from her New York Times, "It's your other wife." (loc. 3083*)

I watched maybe two seasons of The L Word at the time (rather behind release schedule, I imagine). This was back when, if you wanted to watch something you didn't otherwise have access to, someone who understood the Internet better than I did burned you a DVD. (I'm neither justifying this nor recommending it, but my family did not have television, it was the early 2000s in a red state, and teenaged me would literally not have known where to find this show through more above-board means.) Even as a teenager who had watched precious little television, I knew it was not good television, and yet: how could you look away? Teenaged me had scoured Alison Bechdel's Fun Home to make a list of every queer book she mentioned and take that list to the library. I found maybe two of the books on the list, and at least one of those books was wildly depressing. Books that celebrated queerness were hard to find and shows even harder to find (even if you had television). And here were Moennig and Hailey and the rest of the cast presenting queerness as something that was just there, (mostly) not as coming-out stories or trauma but as romance and drama and found family. And two decades later—without, let's be honest, any intention of ever going back and watching the rest of the show**—I'm still here for it.

So this is absolutely a book for readers for whom The L Word meant something or means something. It's a look beyond the ripped DVD at what it was like to make the show and with it redefine part of queer culture. Hailey and Moennig write through a lot of the plot points of the show, and you don't need to be intimately familiar with the show to follow it (again: I've seen maybe two seasons, twenty years ago); I'd still recommend the book to other curious readers and particularly to baby queers who are too young to have caught the first L Word wave. But at its core...this is a love letter to a time and place and context and found family.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

**Nothing personal, L Word, I just still don't watch TV

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.