As shiny, new Asian grocery stores are hailed as retail "saviors," the decades-old Pacific East Mall in Richmond shows how immigrant cultural spaces matter beyond their economic benefits.
In the 2025 anthology, Sex Change and the City, a whole coterie of LGBTQ+ writers and artists hold a magnifying glass to a prime specimen within what co-editor Tuck Woodstock likes to call “the straight people zoo”: legendary HBO series, Sex and the City. There are tattoos, collages, multiple Steve/Aidan slash fanfics, Mad Libs, and a great deal of lovely personal essaying about the underlying (and not-so-underlying) queerness of the main cast. That is to say, this project is terminally online trans shitposting about Sex and the City in glorious book form. Of course we’re thrilled to publish an excerpt from it.
Here, writer and Gender Reveal podcast producer Ozzy Llinas Goodman explores the surprisingly queer undercurrents of the character Carrie Bradshaw's endless quest for heteronormative happiness. What could have been, had she resisted the urge to contort her desires for every fuckboy who came her way?
I have a strong memory of browsing the dollar section at a Bookstar around 2004 and picking up a copy of some Fox News pundit’s book about feminism.[1] As a sheltered but curious queer child, I naturally seized the chance to flip to the chapter about sex. What I found, strangely enough, was an essay arguing that Sex and the City, far from portraying liberated women’s sex lives, was clearly about the sex lives of gay men. Yes, the contemporary conservative case against Sex and the City was that it was transsexual — portraying straight women doing things that only gay men are supposed to do.
I’m sure this stuck with me all these years for no particular reason. But I always assumed that Fox News lady was just sort of talking out of her ass. Imagine my surprise when, a decade or so later, I finally got around to watching the show. In the very first episode, narrator Carrie Bradshaw decides to try having sex “like a man.” (Translation: She won’t bottom, and she will leave immediately after she comes — and before he does.) Carrie has a great time, but tragically, she decides never to repeat the experience. Her main goal was to get revenge on a fuckboy from her past, and it seems he didn’t mind this brush with homosexuality. Carrie moves on when it becomes clear her gender transgression isn’t hurting her ex in the way she wanted.
I’m reminded of the number of advice questions we receive over at Gender Reveal that are some version of “How can I make everyone around me react perfectly to my transition?” Carrie needs to hear the answer too: Even if you do your best impression of “man,” it’s possible your sex partners won’t react in the ways you want them to. You can obsess, or you can move on and maybe try different sex partners! Unfortunately, despite her investment in the trans art of fucking around and finding out, Carrie isn’t exactly on a queer mission of self-discovery. She’s too invested in figuring out the desires of the men she dates to spend much time considering her own. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t seem to even like the majority of these men! She understands that in order to date the kind of wealthy white man she aspires to marry, she must be the kind of woman such a man wants.
It is very trans to be trying so hard to do a gender that doesn’t really seem to be making you happy. Carrie’s attempts to diagnose and catalog the dating norms of elite New Yorkers remind me of my own pre-transition attempts to understand cishet dating norms: hopeless, joyless, and doomed to failure. Somehow, Carrie never seems to internalize the fact that she’s having a bad time overall, maybe because she’s so distracted by other people’s opinions. Like in S1E3, “Bay of Married Pigs,” when a close friend’s husband flashes his dick at Carrie. She freaks out about this, but not because of the actual incident — it’s because her married friends are now shunning her for being an unwed, irresistible mantrap. Carrie is thrilled when her friend “forgives” her, rather than questioning what kind of friends would treat her this way in the first place.
The show presents marriage-obsessed Charlotte as the prude, but all four main characters have pretty boring views of sex.[2] (Carrie might actually be the most sexually conservative — she’s certainly the one who has spent the least time as a lesbian!) Queer characters are present for punchlines, for subplots, and for a fun party, but they rarely take center stage. In fact, the girls are so straight that, at times, they seem to de-gay the people around them. In S2E2, “The Awful Truth,” after Charlotte expresses her hesitation to try anal, Carrie’s gay best friend Stanford quips, “Personally, I don’t like anything in my ass, and I know that may come as a surprise.” Given the number of gay men involved in the writing and production of the show, it’s hard to read this moment as anything other than pandering to straight audiences. (Stanford, baby, WHY!)
Fundamentally, Sex and the City is about the fact that the sex you’re having can only be fully understood in the context of your sexual community. In the case of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, that community is overwhelmingly straight. The queer people involved seem to get some sort of straight contact high, becoming ever more obsessed with monogamy and marriage the more time they spend around Carrie and her friends. Still, as Carrie fights for a semi-traditional heterosexuality, she manages to make a lot of other kinds of sex look hotter and more fun. This is especially true in S2E3, “The Freak Show,” in which the friends pressure Charlotte into dumping a man who gives her seven orgasms in a row because of his “freakish” obsession with oral sex. If there’s a message here, it’s clearly about the dangers of investing too deeply in normality at the expense of what you really enjoy.
At times, it seems like Carrie realizes this, and is on the brink of rejecting a traditional heterosexual narrative. She struggles with monogamy throughout the series, and in the season 2 finale, she considers that maybe she wasn't meant to be married, comparing herself to a wild horse who can’t be tamed. In season 4, she learns sex tips from gay porn and breaks out in hives at the idea of getting straight-married. But the end of the series sees her determine that the problem wasn't monogamous heterosexuality — she just had the wrong guy!
Even if Carrie Bradshaw will never transition, I think she might be doing some sort of mutual aid work in documenting the cishet community. Consider S1E8, “Three’s A Crowd,” in which Miranda learns the age-old lesson that unicorn hunters exist and are, unfortunately, generally too off-putting to have sex with. Or S2E6, “The Cheating Curve,” in which Samantha discovers the joys of erotic shaving. Alan Cumming plays a nonbinary(?) stylist who changes their name to O. Samantha stands to pee at the gay club. Charlotte gets seduced by a chaser who force-mascs her. When the show is at its most queer, it’s also at its most entertaining. It’s too bad the characters themselves don’t seem to see it. Carrie, you know where to find us if you change your mind!
Thanks to Daniel Lanza Rivers’ essay on pg. 160 of Sex Change and the City, I recently realized that this was Ann Coulter’s book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), which is not strictly about feminism, but whatever. ↩︎
Samantha’s approach is the most pleasure-focused, which I think makes it the queerest. But I also find it tiresome how many of her relationship problems stem from the configuration and functioning of her partners’ genitals. It's not that such things are never relevant, but surely if nothing else, queerness is about sex not having to be defined by what's between our legs. ↩︎
