The wedding nevertheless plays backdrop to the kind of conversation that can only happen within the safety confines of a safe space among queers who rightfully disagree on issues central to the community. Moreover, given that the world of the show is almost exclusively queer, such conversations are not tinged with the intractability of bigotry. Instead, they are intellectual exercises that force characters to examine their own biases from within the community. In one scene, Emma flinches as her date, Cruz, wants to have her sit on her lap and give her a kiss. One of the coupled lesbians at their table drunkenly tells Emma that she totally gets it. “When I was a baby queer, I was shifty in public, too!” she says. Emma grimaces in response.
From then on, Emma looks aghast as Cruz and her friends playfully joke about the fact that she is likely a “tourist,” vacationing with Cruz before heading back to her straight world — a term ‘best man’ Nico (Roberta Colindrez) admits she hadn’t had to think about since Shane “was flipping bitches on The L Word,” implying just how problematic she finds the idea in 2019*.* There’s a quick-wittedness to the entire exchange which hinges on nuanced takes on visibility, sexuality and gender performance. Emma, with her feminine aesthetic and perfect makeup and hair “passes,” doesn’t she? So goes the argument, which only makes things worse. Sarcastically, Nico suggests Emma should get an asymmetrical haircut (“How else are queers supposed to announce themselves to the world if not through the confines of the binary?”) giving her new friend the confidence she needs to finally put a stop to the uncomfortable conversation around her.
“I’m sorry I don’t abide by your dated categories of queerness,” Emma spouts at them all. “I’m sorry you think I’m confused or indecisive because I have a wide range of what I can get off to.” It’s a mic-drop of a line that punctuates a heated moment capturing so much of contemporary politics around issues of queerness and fluidity.
The exchange, between a femme-presenting queer woman who opts to not use labels, and a group of lesbians whose style and attitude flaunt visible queerness, unsettles precisely because of how accurately it portrays fraught interactions between LGBTQs with varying opinions about their identity markers. As Nico later puts it, she saw this as an ambush: “I don’t particularly appreciate us acting like our own queer police.” But the discussion gets at key contentious politics that the LGBTQ community has been having with and within itself for decades: Is same-sex marriage really a win, or is it merely an abdication to heteronormative ideals? Is breaking down the gender binary the only way to center queerness? Is one’s sexual object of desire enough of a marker of a queer identity?
There are no easy or right answers to these open-ended questions, not when it comes to friendly banter and less so when it comes to their political ramifications. Vida is not just about queer spaces but about the intra-community conversations that they allow. Emma and Nico and Cruz and her friends exist not as singular examples of “queer women,” but as complex characters who openly wrestle with what that identity (or identities) means. Framed as the show is by wrestling with Mexican-American identities, there’s also no way of untangling these policing moments of femininity and ‘passing’ without understanding the cultural context that surrounds them (it is a vaquero-themed wedding, after all). Similarly, Emma and Lyn’s attempts to attract new crowds to a revamped Vida has them come up against radical groups who oppose their ‘gente-fication,’ a reminder that no community is immune to fractures along political lines.
