Where Is The Lesbian Joy?

Queer media feels louder than it has in years. There’s momentum, excitement, romance stories about men loving men everywhere. Shows, adaptations, fan edits, press tours. Watching something like Heated Rivalry dominate timelines feels like a win, and it is. Representation matters. Joy matters. Seeing queer men get stories that are passionate, layered, and unapologetically romantic is something to celebrate.

But while I feel happiness for that visibility, there’s also a quiet grief that follows it.

When I look for stories about women loving women, I keep finding the same emotional pattern. Tragedy. Longing. Loss. Trauma disguised as depth. Narratives that are beautifully written, critically praised, and emotionally devastating, but rarely soft, playful, or allowed to simply exist in happiness.

A lot of lesbians I know connect deeply with Yellowjackets, with characters like Jackie Taylor and Shauna Shipman, with the intensity, the yearning, the complexity. That makes sense. Those relationships are charged, layered, unforgettable. But they’re also rooted in violence, isolation, and inevitable ruin. When that becomes the primary mirror offered to women loving women, it sends a quiet message, that our love is only interesting when it hurts.

We don’t get enough stories where lesbian relationships are allowed to be light without being shallow. Stories where love between women is messy in the way real relationships are, not catastrophic. Where joy doesn’t have to be earned through suffering. When we do get those stories, they’re often brief, canceled, under-promoted, or treated like a niche moment instead of something universal.

And that’s the part that feels hardest to sit with. Not jealousy. Not resentment. Just the imbalance.

Queer men are finally being shown as romantic leads, as objects of desire, as people worthy of happy endings. Meanwhile, queer women are still so often framed through pain, as cautionary tales, metaphors, or something heavy to carry rather than something joyful to experience.

I want more lesbian stories that feel like breathing out instead of bracing for impact. Stories where the stakes don’t always have to be life-or-death to feel meaningful. Stories where women loving women get to laugh, flirt, grow old, make mistakes, and still choose each other.

This isn’t a call to erase the dark or the complicated. Those stories matter too. But representation shouldn’t only reflect our wounds. It should reflect our warmth. Our humor. Our softness. Our everyday love.

Right now, queer media is expanding, and that’s something to be grateful for. I just hope the next wave makes more room for women loving women to be happy out loud, not just understood through heartbreak.

Because joy shouldn’t be the rarest thing we get to see.