Carrie's Chosen Family

Welcome to Queer Futures, a newsletter on queer community, relationships & friendships! Each week will be a different format. Here’s the monthly format rotation: essay/column, link roundup, personal recs, Q&A with queer and trans people doing cool shit. 

This newsletter features my personal recommendations of what I’m reading, watching, listening to. It’s like mini reviews of films, tv shows, books, podcasts I’m consuming. If you’re here, I’m pretty sure we have similar interests and you’re gonna find something you’ll like! 

This newsletter is behind a paywall because it’s something I created entirely myself. The link roundups and Q&A’s are not behind a paywall because I believe that information should be free to all. 

I watched Sex and the City for the first time ever this year. I didn’t know what to watch on Netflix and there she was — Carrie Bradshaw and six seasons worth of episodes to binge.

I knew enough about the show’s premise that I was ready to dive in. I had watched The Carrie Diaries, the prequel to the series, and loved every minute of it. Yes, I enjoyed a teen soap with a young writer protagonist and fun 80’s fashion! I also hate to admit it but I love watching films and TV shows set in New York. Now that I live here I can spot the fantasy of onscreen New York City. I’m like that’s total bullshit, you can’t make it from that part of Brooklyn to midtown in a half hour like that! I do enjoy how filmmakers romanticize the city and try to capture how magical it is — because it is enchanting, even if you have to be a little delusional to see it.  

From April to July, I watched every SATC episode, both movies, and the reboot. The show is riddled with egregious moments, especially when it comes to trans women and Black men, but I couldn’t stop watching. I had embarked on this journey and needed to see it through to the end. 

So there I was, a 30-something queer, Mexican woman writer living in Brooklyn in 2024 watching a show about a 30-something straight, white woman writer living in Manhattan in 1998 and I couldn’t help but wonder…how could I level up my friendships to match the devotion of Carrie’s crew? It’s a question I thought about as the show progressed.

Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, Charlotte are more than just girlfriends, as the straights would say. They’re chosen family. Even if the lives of these fictional women are wildly different from mine, I recognize the importance of their connections to each other. I see it over and over again in queer communities and here it was modeled by Manhattan’s elite.