dispatch from ye olde lesbian tears

and something about baseball caps in vogue

Welcome to this week’s dispatch from the lesbian internet, a mid-week news roundup from Paging Dr. Lesbian, exclusively for paid subscribers. If you like this type of thing, tell your friends to subscribe.

We’re crying too, Anne & Ann.

To the disappointment of many, it was announced last week that the BBC One/HBO series Gentleman Jack has been canceled following its (brilliant) second season. This is undoubtedly a massive loss for lesbian and queer media more broadly, as Anne Lister’s (Suranne Jones) presence as a butch lesbian on screen remains something of a miracle in and of itself. Indeed, the series’ bold refusal to ever cow to heterosexual standards of respectability or play to straight audiences in any way is one of the things that made it so brilliant, but perhaps led to its downfall as well. The series was reportedly one of HBO’s lowest-rated dramas, and BBC One will likely not be able to continue producing the show without HBO’s financial partnership. This news is hugely disappointing for many reasons, one of which is the fact that there is so much more of Anne Lister’s story to tell – she wrote a five-million-word diary in her lifetime, after all. This doesn’t bode well for the future of lesbian media, especially media as audacious as this. As usual, lesbian media seems to only ever receive support from other lesbians, which doesn’t mean much to a company like HBO.

Anne Lister judging HBO.