In the brief time in which it has been my privilege to write about Last Tango in Halifax, I have been struck by the people who have come forward to say how much this show has helped them talk about queerness with their parents. In showing a gay couple fight and kiss and fall out and make up and do all the things that constitute love, this relationship has normalized lesbianism for a whole demographic of people who were sure as hell never going to watch The L Word. I felt much the same way about Under The Dome, and when Alice died, grieving her was a healthy, cathartic experience for a mostly straight audience. But that was a show in which a mystical dome descends on a town and kills a lot of people. This isn’t. We don’t need Kate to die in order to be invested in the drama of these people’s lives. We don’t need soap opera level theatrics; the beauty of Last Tango is the quiet beauty of the mundane, and if Sally Wainwright doesn’t know that, she isn’t half the writer she thinks she is. Kate and Caroline, as a couple, have so much more to give and to teach us. Kate means so much more than another body to add to the mass grave television digs for its lesbians (and especially its lesbians of color.) I hope that she gets the chance to prove it.
