And in the early aughts, a new kind of acceptable lesbian emerged, especially on mainstream television: the pregnant lesbian. Most mainstream literature and post-Hayes Code Hollywood depictions of lesbians have come with punishing implications for women who love and stay with other womendeath, prison, or ending up with a man. In Andrea’s case, she’s peraps even more offensive in that she’s already lesbian-identified but now giving a man a try, as some well-meaning mothers and fathers might suggest. Because despite the discussions and wider acceptance of sexual fluidity in 2018, queer women (especially those that are strongly lesbian-identified) have been tired of stories that have lesbians going back to men ( The Kids Are All Right as an infamous example). Johnson operates under the idea of scary as exciting fueled by a kind of third-rail storytelling, she had to ignore the impending opposition early on. “But then I was so bored because I was writing a straight story about like this white guy doing something wrong, and I didn’t care,” she continued, “so I thought ‘What if the girlfriend is a lesbian?’ And then the story got interesting to me.”

“And I thought ‘Oh, how can I kind of raise the stakes for the character? So I had him ditch a girlfriend, but then I made her a pregnant girlfriend. “I think at the time I was homesick from northern Minnesota where I was from, so I created this character who would just ditch everything and go there and when he was there, I thought, ‘What did he leave behind?” Johnson tells INTO. But back to how this story began―as a short one about Ryan, but who lived in rural, freezing, Northern Minnesota.

Stray city by chelsey johnson