Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

36 - The World's Loudest Lesbian

February, 2008

Working in children's television was a lot like contracting herpes. You were aware that herpes existed, you knew that people got herpes all the time, but you never imagined that you would be one of those people.

(And later on, you discovered that a lot more people had herpes than you realized.)

During the strike, Tom and I sometimes picketed with a daytime animation writer named Gia, a delightfully caustic lesbian in her early thirties who, we were told, looked a lot like Justin Bieber. (We didn't actually know what Justin Bieber looked like, nor did we know that lesbians looking like Justin Bieber was a phenomenon in lesbian culture.)

"Did you always want to write for children's TV?" I stupidly asked one day. Gia pushed her mirrored sunglasses up onto her forehead so I could clearly see the disdain in her Bieber-ish eyes.

"Nobody," she said acerbically, "fucking wants to fucking write for fucking children's TV." She held my gaze for a few moments more to let her words truly sink in, then glowered at Tom, then slid her shades back down.

"I guess that's a no?" Tom deadpanned and Gia laughed. She had a very loud laugh. She had a very loud everything. We really liked her.

Anyway, Gia had originally hoped to work in primetime, but she needed to make a living, so she took the job she could get, rather than hold out for the one she wanted. She had, unwittingly, taken her first step into the children's television quicksand. Because every year she spent writing for kids made it increasingly difficult to escape. I mean, good luck getting a gig on How I Met Your Mother or Sex & The City or even a primetime animated show like Family Guy or The Simpsons when all of your credits were from shows like Yo Gabba Gabba, Dora The Explorer and Blue's Clues.

We had no idea, during that conversation, that by the summer of 2010, we'd be up to our necks in the herpetic quicksand of children's television, with the world's loudest lesbian by our side.

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The journey was rather meandering.

A month after Tom and I lost our Disney deal, The Writers Strike finally, wearily, ended. (Did we win? Even with the benefit of hindsight I can't really say. All I know for sure is that the studios sure as hell didn't lose.) And what was surprising was that, for us, the worst day of the strike wasn't when we got the news of our termination, but the Monday after it was all over and everyone went back to work. Everyone, it seemed, but us.

It reminds me of the parents of fallen sons in World War Two. First, the tragedy of that grim notification from the War Department and then another tragedy as they watched everyone else gratefully hugging their boys, while their own child was still and forever, silently, irretrievably gone.

Which, now that I think about it, is a wildly offensive analogy. I mean, comparing an American soldier making the ultimate sacrifice fighting to rid the world of totalitarianism... to a comedy writer whining about losing a cushy gig while he picks up his private school-educated kids in his Lexus? Quite frankly, it's that kind of vainglorious psychobabble from entitled jerks like me that makes folks in the flyover states hate us show biz types to begin with. And using the term flyover states probably doesn't help matters, either.

Honestly, people. I don't know why you put up with me.

Anyway, with so much uncertainty — in our career specifically, but also in the entertainment landscape generally; the explosion of content from Netflix and Amazon and Hulu (and pretty much anyone else with a few hundred million dollars to burn) was just around the corner — Tom and I decided to cast as wide a net as possible. We took any meeting we could and we booked any job we were offered, in an as many areas as possible. We were simultaneously charging down numerous disparate paths to see which of them ultimately panned out as a viable career.