Crowley presenting as female to be Warlock’s Nanny? The way this was filmed, acted, and written wasn’t made to be funny whatsoever. She was stunning, I loved the hat!

Pollution using they/them pronouns while the postman used the gender neutral honorific of sir for them? What’s there to make fun of? They’re royalty.

Archangel Michael, who has a traditionally male name, played by a female actress? Never questioned.

Lord Beelzebub’s androgyny? Only respect for the Lord of Hell.

Aziraphale sharing Madame Tracy’s body? Crowley recognized his angel and accepted it no problem. He was right about the dress too, it did suit him!

Crowley’s pure, unfiltered non-binary/gender-fluid energy in general? Fucking fabulous. Who could seriously make fun of this demon’s style? As someone once pointed out to me, you could swap him with Tilda Swinton and I’d see no difference. What an icon.

For our angels and demons, it was intensely liberating having male and female actors auditioning for the same roles, and just picking the ones who we felt nailed the characters best.

Also, can I just hear a wahoo for the wonderful Archangel Uriel, Gloria Obianyo?

Irl probably almost nobody would kick this guy out. A lot of internet discourse would. But that kind of makes no sense.

I grew up in the theatre community, and after I learned what being gay was I discovered that gay people were everywhere in theatre. But so were straight people that just kind of fell outside of societal norms a bit. Straight people that often just felt more comfortable around gay people because they could just be themselves.

And yeah that’s an obvious example of people that aren’t queer hanging out in queer spaces but there’s also a ton of gray area. Straight polyamorous people for example. People that identify as cis that “crossdress” or even do some things that might be considered to be part of “transitioning”. Or some intersex people that don’t id with the lgbt community. Or people that id as non binary but not as trans.

At some point you need to stop trying to figure out who definitively belongs in the club because like... there is no club. Irl queer spaces tend to cover huge swaths of people. There’s a lot of gray area. And also you’ll also tend to find a lot of cishet gender conforming people in these spaces too. Because their significant other or a family member or a good friend is lgbt+ or because they’re poly or because they just feel more comfortable around queer people or they just feel like fighting for gay rights is something that they’re supposed to be doing. And if they’re respectful and the space isn’t explicitly “no cishet right now” then like, them being there isn’t that much of an issue usually.

Now, a lot of people’s first impulse is to say they have internalised homophobia, but a) that’s rude as hell to assume about a stranger and b) a lot of them just... don’t. They’ve thought about it and they aren’t gay! They have straight lives that they’re fine with, and sometimes they have sex with men!

And something that gets me about Queer Identity Discourse is that it would just immediately declare these people Not Gay And Not In Need Of Our Resources, when they clearly are! They have the same struggles with HIV/AIDS as gay men, they get criminalised by anti-gay sex laws the same as gay men -- they just happen to identify as straight!

don’t buy it.

our younger brothers and sisters might eat a tide pod and get us blamed for it, but we have more in common with them than we ever had with boomers or gen x.