Fail! Fail everywhere!
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, the author of The Dirty Girls Social Club, discusses how Hollywood turned her Afro-Colombian-American character, a straight-laced and squeaky-clean monogamous lesbian, into a sexed-up cheating bisexual with no noticeable African ancestry. (Her Birkenstocky partner? Nowhere to be seen.) Why?


“We had to make her bisexual because the lesbian story line isn’t fresh anymore,” Lynnette told me. (By that standard, we ought to make all straight characters bisexual too, no?) “And, let’s face it,” she said snarkily, “no one trusts a bisexual.”

Wowwww.

In fact, EVERYBODY in the adaptation has been seriously sexed up regardless of the characters' actual, you know, personalities and beliefs and book-verse behavior. (Except for the overweight character, of course, when she acts sexual it's just a fat joke.) And the diversity of the Hispanic population has been completely bled out of the script.

ETA: The fail is coming from all directions! The author's stance on some of this is pretty slut-shaming, and then there's this, where she comes out as bisexual in an email interview with AfterEllen. And then gets offended when mentioned as bi on her Wikipedia page and retracts it, claiming to identify as straight. (Then there's a weird blog post she made entitled Under Attack By Lesbians, claiming that she only tried to retract her comments because hard-right Cuban exiles were making attempts on her life. But she baleeted it and it's probably lost to us now.) Is she bi? Straight? Questioning? Who knows?

She also did the same thing again, claiming to have bipolar disorder after David Foster Wallace's suicide and then retracting it. The David Shankbone from the AfterEllen interview calls her on her bullshit, to which she, well:

Alisa took such exception to these statements, that in response she wrote this about me (as if I wrote it myself):

You are a tremendous fucking bitch, and I suck donkey dicks with communist straws. I was hired by the Cuban government to “fix” your wiki page, but they asked that I never tell you this. Oopsies! I have to remember not to promise Fidel anything when I’m high on peyote. My bad.

Strange times on Wikipedia, indeed.

I have no idea what's going on anymore. *makes popcorn*