“How do you guys feel about the word ‘lesbian’?” asks Georgia Robert, a contestant on BBC Three’s reality show I Kissed a Girl. She’s asking the question of other contestants, a group of women lounging on pool chairs in the blinding Italian sun. “I don’t mind it, really and truly,” responds Priya immediately. “I use it. I don’t know why people shy away from that word.” Priya’s match, meanwhile, does shy away from the word: “I just say I’m gay,” admits Naee. “I don’t like using the word ‘lesbian.’” Abbie adds, “I just say, ‘Oh I’m into girls.’ Or I say I’m queer.” Her match, Lisha, doesn’t say anything as she reclines in Abbie’s arms, wearing a sleeveless hoodie and fanning herself with a rainbow fan.

Georgia’s question isn’t divisive and the answers she receives feel genuine. The words queer people use to identify themselves are never uniform. But what shifts a moment of good chat into something more serious is Georgia’s next question.

“Do you guys know why the L is the first letter in the LGBTQ+?” she asks. No one does. “You know, back with the HIV and the AIDS epidemic,” she explains, “obviously that was like gay men, so nobody wanted to help them. It was lesbians that were helping them and, like, nursing them.” Georgia visibly tears up. Priya says she has goosebumps. Meg gets up and wraps her arms around Georgia. Eva wipes some tears away. In the preceding confessional, Georgia is still teary as she admits that she’s struggled to identify as a lesbian, to feel proud of what it means—or to even say the word—because of the way it was used as a slur while she was growing up. She ends her thoughts: “It still bothers me but it shouldn’t. Because it’s such a good word.”

A truism worth repeating is that queers deserve to see happy queers on TV. It is essential to promote queer narratives that aren’t saturated by trauma, portray queerness as doomed, or end in death. But, as this tearful scene shows, many of I Kissed a Girl’s most heartwarming moments correspond to the girls being vulnerable with one another and sharing difficult life experiences underwritten by homophobia, external or internalized. It was these moments that made the show’s representation of joy feel earnest. Witnessing these women’s happiness is possible because we also witness their successful navigation of a world that is unwelcoming of difference—which includes navigating a lot of big, often bad feelings.

For herself, then, Georgia’s tears facilitate a process of healing. But for the other girls, Georgia’s tears are curative, knitting them together into a shared feeling of pride. At one point, Lisha—who had previously not spoken at all when asked about how she felt about the word lesbian—now perks her head up and says, “Do you know what? After that story, I can’t wait to go out and just tell people ‘I’m a fucking lesbian.’” The comment is both endearing and important.

Like its clear antecedent Love Island, BBC Three’s I Kissed a Girl confines its cast to a big villa—in this case, an Italian masseria—where they all sleep in the same room and, for most of the show, wear swimwear. The shows are also similar in that, for each person to remain on the show, they must remain in a couple. Every week there is a “kiss off” where couples stand back to back and “reveal their kiss” by turning around; indicating they will remain committed to one other. Like so many dating shows, it privileges the couple form, even while inserting contestants into a pseudo-polyamorous situation. Locking your desire to one person is rewarded, even as the premise of the show necessitates the ability to desire more than one person at a time.

Yet I Kissed a Girl distances itself from modeling toxic behavior (unlike a seemingly similar show, The Ultimatum: Queer Love). Moreover, the show has what I might call “teachable moments”—like Georgia’s lesson about the acronym LGBTQ—that aim to present and explore some aspect of queer culture. Later in the season all of the bisexual women gather on the terrace to share what being bisexual means for them and how it’s misconstrued by others. In another episode, the masc-leaning women gather to talk about when they first started resisting girls’ clothes or exploring their gender. Though instructive and seemingly staged, these moments generate comradery between cast members.

The women of I Kissed a Girl are in their early 20s. And while most of them aren’t new to being queer, many of them note that they come from places where queer community is sparse. Which is to say, they’re still figuring things out. Consequently, their drama unfolds not because of ploys to get attention, manipulative behavior, or tortured intrigues, but because someone needs time to understand their feelings or because they don’t know how their gendered presentation matches someone else’s and how this will play out in terms of physical attraction. Perhaps that is why a review in The Guardian praises the show’s “touching” and “heartwarming” overtones, its spotlighting of clear communication, and its lack of “villains.” A Substack post exclaims “These women are HAPPY,” and a recap on Autostraddle asserts the cast is “so good natured.”

It’s true that I Kissed a Girl’s representation of communication is surprisingly good. I would go so far as to say that the show is a gift for dykes who are looking for some reality TV that isn’t totally vapid (although maybe that’s an oxymoron).

Yet to view I Kissed a Girl as predominantly upbeat is to miss why it’s representation of bad feelings is important. Indeed, it misses how such bad feelings necessarily correspond to any joy the show represents.

What makes “I Kissed a Girl” so great is that it foregrounds queers who openly relay their traumas. And they do so, crucially, without being consumed by such traumas.

In queer theory’s quest to understand and interrogate the cultural politics of emotion, bad feelings have long been its focus of study. According to Nicole Seymour, this focus often takes two forms: “‘bad,’ as in negative affects such as shame, guilt, depression, and melancholia … and ‘bad’ as in inappropriate affects, including humor, camp, frivolity, and irony.”

In many ways, these “bad” feelings are two sides of the same coin. Camp can be understood as a method of resisting or critiquing the constraints of normativity—which produce feelings such as shame. By focusing on bad feelings, queer theory also outlines how feeling bad isn’t a sign of personal failure but rather that something is wrong with a world that accepts certain bodies and not others. In this way, bad feelings become useful. We can think of the catchphrase “Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you” as spotlighting this use. Rage replaces happiness in its refusal of assimilatory gay politics; it calls out how the insistence to “be happy” harbors regulatory effects.

Theorizing such affective imperatives, Sara Ahmed warns against the “promise of happiness” when it depends on the reproduction of social forms (like bio family and marriage) which are already seen as creating happiness, even as they have been weaponized against queers. She articulates how queer happiness always involves active and difficult negotiations with a world that perceives queerness as aberrant and thus fails to provide for the conditions of our well-being.

Considered in this light, what makes I Kissed a Girl so great is that it foregrounds queers who openly relay their traumas. And they do so, crucially, without being consumed by such traumas, or erasing the essential differences they reveal.

This is especially salient when Priya and Lailah bond over living in Cardiff and having grown up in Wales as queer women of color. Priya is surprised she’s never seen Lailah at any gay clubs. Lailah admits that she’s never been to a gay club, continuing, “When I was younger, we used to walk down past the gay club. You’d hear negative comments when you walked by. Little remarks about the people that were in there. And they actually shape who you grow up to be.”

The force and endurance of these comments is clear, if only because they’ve continued to affect Lailah’s decisions. In her confessional, she shares that being a queer woman from South Wales is something she’s proud of now, but in the past, it was something she actively suppressed: “Any time sexuality would even come up in a conversation, I’d feel so anxious, like, I’d feel it all over my body. Like God forbid anyone figures out that I also like women.” This feeling “all over” her body, of anxiety and anticipatory shame, evidences how homophobia impresses itself onto bodies: it is literally felt on the surface of our skin, shaping how we relate to others. This knowledge is affirmed and corroborated by Priya, which generates a sense of solidarity; their words become warm and reassuring. For me, as a viewer, Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “to narrate unhappiness can be affirmative” echoed behind this scene.

In Lailah and Priya’s conversation, their embodied feelings of discomfort are also about race. Priya shares that while growing up in Wales, in addition to being fearful of revealing her queerness, she was scared to say a Punjabi word or play bhangra around her friends for fear of being laughed at. Lailah nods, then elaborates on Priya’s story: “We’re not just talking about being queer, we’re talking about our race as well and our culture. It’s different. You can’t just separate them.”

Only five out of the fifteen women on the show are women of color. So even if I Kissed a Girl is a benchmark for queer representation, in being such, it reveals the ongoing realities of discrimination—as Lailah and Priya illuminate. Equally important are the ways this moment of shared vulnerability tacks shame to the backside of pride. It maps how queers’ self-acceptance must grapple with a world that views their self-acceptance as shameful.

In other words, Lailah’s present happiness is generated by engaging with negativity; it is neither given nor spontaneous. Her good feelings are contingent on a history of listening to her body and realizing that her embodied experience of racism and homophobia offers evidence of what is wrong with the world.

Yet some of the show’s bad feelings don’t resolve in self-acceptance or pride.

After the first kiss-off, Meg and Eva lie in adjoining beds and ask each other how they’re feeling about the results. While they aren’t paired up, their dialogue is implicitly flirtatious. Meg asks Eva what her “type” is and if she goes for femme women. Eva admits that none of the girls she’s been in a relationship with have been with a woman before. When Meg chides her for going after straight girls, Eva gestures vaguely to her body and counters, “They’re not straight because they’re not straight.” Her gesture implies that if these women are attracted to her, then their heterosexually isn’t exactly secure. Outside of the masseria, Meg is a performer and self-titled “fire-breather.” She’s also heroically compassionate. Over the course of the show, the emotional labor she’s willing to provide for different love interests is deeply generous, even if it is, at times, painful to watch. Picking up on Eva’s discomfort, Meg asks if her experience with past girlfriends has been difficult. Eva answers affirmatively, saying, “Like, it’s this thought of, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to realize I’m a girl in a second.’ I’ve got no boobs so when they put their head on my chest, I’m thinking—and it’s so bad—I’m like ‘Oh, this is great. It’s probably gonna feel similar to like what it is if it’s a guy.’ It’s really weird.”

So much is at play here. Eva is worried someone will “realize” she’s a girl, even as this identification isn’t a secret. Yet “this is great” implies some enjoyment of having a flat chest, although her enjoyment might only come from being what she thinks is expected of her, as in, more masculine. Outside of the conversation, in a confessional, Eva’s big blue eyes are full of withheld tears. “Straight girls can damage you so much and not even realize,” she says. “With my exes, I wouldn’t ever really have them, like looking at my body, and feeling like they wanted me.”

This painful admission has no resolution beyond the salve of Meg’s attentive listening. Which is not nothing. Eva is also surrounded by openly queer women, and she and Meg are able to laugh about how this will be good for her. I do find it interesting that Eva first asserts that her exes “aren’t straight” and then recalls this statement because it boomerangs from interpellating these women as queer and then distancing herself from them. In a basic sense, this oscillation might inform how Eva doesn’t want to be perceived as “going after straight girls” even as she has been hurt by women who have made her feel undesirable. Yet what is most important is that Eva feels safe enough to articulate such complicated (and pretty nuanced) feelings.

Ultimately, Eva and Meg’s exchange ends easefully. And this underscores how the joy of queer community may not always look characteristically joyful. Instead, it may look like sharing something vulnerable and having someone listen.

Of course, I Kissed a Girl is full of chaotic gay energy, sex jokes, and campy moments (for example, when Thea and Lailah lead a group meditation and everyone expresses gratitude for vaginas). The show is a delight for all of these reasons and more.

Yet—in our current moment of heightened violence against LGBTQ+ people—it feels vital to honor the ways in which queer joy is earned. And to acknowledge how it is sustained through earnest care. The work we do with and for one another to cultivate joy involves grappling with a whole host of bad feelings. And this, obviously, is what makes it so much more special and important to put on TV. 

Featured image: Still from I Kissed a Girl / BBC Three.