admin The first two seasons of And Just Like That… have been none too kind to one Ms. Miranda Hobbes. She left her very sweet husband, fell hard for a semi-failed stand-up comic by the name of Che Diaz, moved to LA to support Che during the pilot season (oh, babe), spent a bunch of time flopping around Hudson Yards pretending to be cool with various things, and ultimately got semi-obliterated by the “trainwreck” (in Che’s own words) that was their relationship.
Of course, a string of bad relationship choices that leads to overstaying your welcome in your friend’s spare room could happen to anyone (or, at least, it’s happened to me; thank you to Jazmine and Gabe for putting me up for that full post-breakup week of 2021 where all I did was cry and make blender margaritas). But it’s hard for me not to resent Miranda a tiny bit for all the mess she’s unleashed on Steve; Che; Carrie; her son, Brady; and pretty much everyone else. That said, I’m aware the people I should really be resenting are AJLT’s writers, since Miranda is fictional. I just wish she’d gotten a little more support in her messy, mid-50s coming-out journey because sometimes? Those journeys are the hardest.
Again, Miranda is fictional (I promise I know this, even though after two and a half decades, she feels more vividly real to me than some of my own distant family members), but the phenomenon of queer people being hung out to dry by their loved ones when they come out later in life is all too real. There’s the overt homophobia and transphobia to worry about, of course, but then there’s the subtle distancing that can happen when an aspect of your life that your friends and family have always taken for granted, like your sexuality or gender identity, evolves in a way they don’t expect.
I don’t know the experience of coming out in your 50s, but when I first cautiously mentioned to a friend that I thought I might be queer, at age 23, I was weirdly crushed by their response. It went something like: “If you were queer, don’t you think you’d know it by now?” I was sure my friend was right, convinced that my upbringing in relatively LGBTQ+-friendly New York City and my stint skinny-dipping and doing Indigo Girls karaoke at my small Ohio liberal-arts college would have clued me in to my queerness if it were in any way…real. Of course, my friend was wrong, and so was I; I went on my first date with a girl shortly after and came out as a proud, loud, probably annoying lesbian soon after that. But I’ll never forget the shame I felt, wondering if the thought that hadn’t stopped running through my head for months—I am queer—wasn’t for me to claim, after all.
