#it's the fourth of fucking july 🫩

This ask is from January and I genuinely have no idea what post it's in response to, and even though this ask comes off incredibly condescendingly, I'm going to respond to it anyway because I fundamentally disagree.

There's really nothing about Rizzoli and Isles that was just the way "lesbian" tv shows were made in the mid-2000s (and I promise, I was alive in the mid-2000s). There is a fundamental difference between queercoding because a network or audience wants plausible deniability rather than putting openly queer characters on screen and the specific combination of queerbaiting and ignorance that produced Rizzoli and Isles. It was harder to find, for sure, but lesbians were on TV in the 2000s. I was literally steered away from watching Rizzoli and Isles in its original run and pointed to, by the queer people in my life, gayer TV that didn't taunt its audience. These characters may have been written as in love, but a lot of it seems to come from a sort of clumsiness rather than deliberate queercoding. So much of it they tried to walk back. And finally, we all know how Angie Harmon felt about Jane being read as gay. She was not a happy camper. Jane reading SO lesbian was again, a kind of clumsiness.