The L Word’s Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey on Power Lesbians and On-Set Romance

Sipping on an Erewhon smoothie over Zoom, the actress Leisha Hailey posed a tantalizing question to her best friend and former co-star Kate Moennig: “Can we surprise each other after all these years?” Considering the pair have practically been joined at the hip since the first time they met at auditions for The L Word, perhaps not. Brought together seemingly by fate (and talent) on the beloved cult-classic show, Hailey played Alice Pieszecki, the opinionated L.A. journalist to Moennig’s Shane McCutcheon, the womanizer with a secret sensitive side. A pioneer of queer representation on screen, The L Word was the first television show to feature an ensemble of all-lesbian characters and thus became required viewing for every baby gay. Now, over 20 years since its premiere, the lesbian icons have collaborated once again—this time on a podcast, PANTS, and a memoir appropriately titled So Gay for You. The book, which came out (pun intended) this week, chronicles their lives on the groundbreaking series and their experiences navigating queerness in early 2000s Hollywood. Before setting out on a nationwide book tour, Moennig and Hailey sat down to talk about lesbian girl code, why there will never be another Shane McCutcheon, and how their friendship has endured over the years.

———

KATE MOENNIG: So this is PANTS in written form.

LEISHA HAILEY: I guess so. You seem so nervous to talk to me today. 

MOENNIG: Well, I didn’t know if I had to come up with some clever angle because I know you so well. I guess we just shoot the shit like usual.

HAILEY: This also is a good opportunity for you to get to know me better.

MOENNIG: Yeah, I’ve always wanted to get inside and really understand who you are.

HAILEY: You know, I am a woman with a lot of surprises, but you have to ask me things. Maybe that’s the goal today. Can we surprise each other after all these years? I actually have some questions for you.

MOENNIG: All right.

HAILEY: When do you think you realized you were a grown-up?

MOENNIG: Ooh. Am I a grown-up? Don’t you still feel like you’re a 14-year-old kid?

HAILEY: There’s stuff that no one really prepares you for. You know when you look at your parents when you’re a kid and they look just beaten down by life?

MOENNIG: They’re just humans trying to figure it out. 

HAILEY: My parents held down multiple jobs and had two kids. How the hell did they do it and why am I so tired? I have nothing to complain about. I guess I realized I was an adult in my early 40s when I finally bought my house. All of a sudden, I owned something and I was tasked with real issues.

MOENNIG: When did I feel like an adult? 

HAILEY: You might not be there yet, and that’s okay.

MOENNIG: I just kind of always feel like a 14-year-old deep down.

HAILEY: Okay. I’m going to keep going with my questions.

MOENNIG: How about this one? I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this. What is the quality you most like in a woman? And I don’t just mean because you’re gay. 

HAILEY: Are you talking physically?

MOENNIG: No, I’ll change it. What’s a quality you most like in a human?

HAILEY: Oh, I was really into the woman thing. Can you imagine if I just went into all the qualities I love about men? [Laughs] “I like strong arms and I just want to be held and taken care of.”

MOENNIG: What I really want them to do is lift the heavy things that I can’t lift. That’s about it.

HAILEY: The qualities I love most, it might sound trite, but they have to have a sense of humor or I would die a quick death. And by the way, I have been with people like that, and I did die. But when I’m with someone funny, like Kim [Dickens], for instance, every day we’re dying laughing about something.

MOENNIG: Well, maybe that’s what kept our relationship alive. Finding a similar sense of humor is not always easy.

HAILEY: It’s the goal. Did you have a nickname growing up that I don’t know about?

MOENNIG: My father called me Kate-O. 

HAILEY: I didn’t know that. If you want me to carry on the legacy, I’m excited to do that.

MOENNIG: I mean, swirl it around, see if it makes sense for you. Let’s not force it. 

HAILEY: I desperately wanted a nickname when I was a kid, so I tried to get one started in elementary school. “Bubba.” I just thought it sounded cool.

MOENNIG: You wanted to be called Bubba?

HAILEY: I did. I tried to get my soccer friends to, but it didn’t stick. 

MOENNIG: I can see your sister just eyerolling you to death. Are you drinking an Erewhon smoothie?

HAILEY: I know, I’m sorry. Kim just brought me one.

MOENNIG: Don’t do that to me. Wait, you sent this book to some people, haven’t you? What’s your response been?

MOENNIG: I’ve only sent it out to a few people and it’s interesting to hear what they think. It just shows you how it’s all based on perception.

HAILEY: Are they responding poorly?

MOENNIG: No, all positive. It’s just that they say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that happened or you felt that way.” I’m curious if you’ve had that yet, because I know your dad went to a bookstore and bought five copies.

HAILEY: Yeah, he’s only like three pages in.

MOENNIG: Oh, so it’s a real page-turner for him. [Laughs] I’m excited to hear what your family thinks.

HAILEY: Me too. I’m most nervous about them because they’re the ones I care about the most. It’s weird to write about other people, though, because you’re like, “This is my experience of you, but maybe you don’t like what I’m saying.”

MOENNIG: They’re also not public people. I can imagine it must be a little jarring to think, “Now people are going to know about me.” Meanwhile, you and I are just writing away, la-di-dah.

HAILEY: Well, we’re used to that. People have written good and cruel things about us since the day we got into this business. I think we have thick skin.

MOENNIG: Yeah. I don’t recall hearing anything poor written about you, though.

HAILEY: I don’t think it’s flooding in by any means, but it’s happened along the way.

MOENNIG: Well, it’s not our business to figure out what people think. It defeats the purpose of creativity to wonder if you’re satisfying everyone. It’s an impossible task.

HAILEY: When we’re done with this book tour, I know we have other projects in the works, but is there something outside of work that you’re dying to do with me?

MOENNIG: Well, just to preface, I love doing everything with you. I could walk to the corner with you and we would have fun. But we did have a plan five years ago to go on a road trip with the dogs. Then the world shut down and we didn’t do it. I still think we would have a blast.

HAILEY: Where?

MOENNIG: To Texas. Marfa.

HAILEY: You want to get in a car with me and drive at least 2,000 miles? That’s what you would want to do after all this?

MOENNIG: It just sounds like a fun adventure.

HAILEY: Okay. I would prefer to not do the car. Let’s just fly somewhere.

MOENNIG: You might not feel that way after the tour. You might be like, “Ugh, enough of this one.” [Laughs] You and I have a habit of going into these cities we don’t know very well, wandering around, and getting lost, and that is heaven.

HAILEY: That’s the fun part. As Kim has always said about our podcasts, we’re two knuckleheads without a plan, and it’s kind of how we are in life. When we show up in a city, we’re not the people that research the best restaurant or a museum. We just go, “I don’t know,” and we let the day unfold. 

MOENNIG: Flying by the seat of your pants requires, I believe, a certain level of trust and sensibility to have that happen so seamlessly where it’s not an inconvenience.

HAILEY: I wouldn’t call it seamless always.

MOENNIG: But it is. Emotionally, it’s seamless. That doesn’t happen often. 

HAILEY: Remember when we got trapped in some weird hotel we couldn’t get out of? It felt like we were there for like 30 days, but it was only three days. It was so big, the inside looked like the outside.

MOENNIG: Yes.

HAILEY: I had left, but you hadn’t left. You were still inside. That was like hell on earth. And not one of us ever said, “Let’s get out.” That’s what I mean. No one’s driving the train in this relationship. No one’s at the helm. 

MOENNIG: There is no captain on this ship. If we were on a boat, it’d be right into the iceberg. We’d die at the same time in sync. No one has to suffer for too long without the other.

HAILEY: Okay, let’s talk about the book or The L Word. People want to know, Kate.

MOENNIG: We still want to know, Leish.

HAILEY: Okay. Hmm. Were there any on-set romances?

MOENNIG: Well, to reveal that would be revealing someone else’s personal experience. So you got to go neutral and say what happened in Vancouver stays in Vancouver.

HAILEY: I mean, really, the answer is yes. No one’s ever going to know anything about it, though. Every year, there was one or some or many. 

MOENNIG: I know that someone spilled it. My favorite, without naming any names, is when the boyfriends would be left in L.A. and be completely forgotten about.

HAILEY: Yeah.

MOENNIG: Whoever was up shooting for a stint, that was always my favorite. “My boyfriend Brian’s at home.” We’re like, “Oh, is he?”

HAILEY: “You didn’t want to bring him?”

MOENNIG: “You didn’t want to have him come visit for the weekend? Okay.”

HAILEY: Okay, here’s another. You know how there were all those gay signifiers in the original show that we would sit around talking about?

MOENNIG: Like the fingernails? 

HAILEY: And the shoes and the jeans. Do you think those exist anymore? Because I don’t, but I can still peg a gay person. I’m probably at 95% with my gaydar.

MOENNIG: Yeah, absolutely.

HAILEY: I think it’s more of a gay energy, not necessarily what kind of jeans you have on. Those all went out the window.

MOENNIG: I’ve met some gays that you would never assume were gay and they wound up being so. But that’s fun.

HAILEY: I mean, nails can be an inch-and-a-half long now and you can be a lesbian. If we were to shoot that scene today, no one would understand what the fuck we were talking about. I think that’s super dated.

MOENNIG: But maybe our show was a part of that shift.

HAILEY: Right, it broke it wide open?

MOENNIG: Exactly.

HAILEY: Why do we even put ourselves in boxes? I was guilty of doing it. I mean, I would box myself in like, “I can’t wear a purse.”

MOENNIG: Oh my god. Everybody did it. When the show first aired, and I said this in the book, nobody knew how to label Shane. Everyone’s like, “She’s the butch one.” And I’m like, “Really? Is she? I don’t think she is.” That’s the only word people knew to describe this kind of woman. You had butch and femme and that was kind of it, and they were really broad. It was so binary. You could call her androgynous, you could call her a tomboy, a number of things, but butch? That doesn’t line up. And it took a minute for anyone to realize that.

HAILEY: That would be the last word I would use to describe Shane or you.

MOENNIG: Exactly. But that was the word being used. It’s like there were three words: butch, quirky, and femme. And power lesbian. 

HAILEY: Yeah, power lesbian was a big one.

MOENNIG: You fell into the quirky category. 

HAILEY: Well, quirky is also code for “can’t decide.”

MOENNIG: Yeah, like, she’s just quirky. Anytime I hear that word, I think of a character with reading glasses askew on their face and hair sticking up in different directions.

HAILEY: Just riddled with indecision.

MOENNIG: Yeah. I remember even hearing the word quirky, I was like, “Oh, god.” It would even be put in character descriptions when you’d get sides for a role.

HAILEY: Oh, I auditioned for so many quirky roles.

MOENNIG: The other one was “edgy.”

HAILEY: That’s us in a nutshell. Okay, do you think there’s a difference between lesbians in New York and Los Angeles?

MOENNIG: Not now. But I know when I was younger and I first moved to L.A., there was.

HAILEY: Same.

MOENNIG: You lived in L.A. before I did. I moved there right after we finished the pilot, and you were like, “Your eyes are going to go wide and the sky’s going to open up.”

HAILEY: Yeah, it was like Candy Land.

MOENNIG: Speaking of that, do you remember where we used to go in the early 2000s? Where were the hotspots for the gay girls in L.A.?

HAILEY: When I first showed up, Little Frida’s was the place to go. It was like The Planet, the coffee shop [from The L Word].

MOENNIG: Right.

HAILEY: Kathleen owned and ran it. Every baby dyke in the world lived there. And then we would cross the street after we hung out all day together and we’d go to the Normandie Room.

MOENNIG: Oh, I loved the Normandie Room.

HAILEY: Yeah, and we’d shoot pool and drink beer.

MOENNIG: What was that great bar on Santa Monica that also—

HAILEY: Oh, The Palms.

MOENNIG: I loved The Palms. I was sad to see that go.

HAILEY: That’s the thing. Not that we took it for granted, but it was always there until it wasn’t.

MOENNIG: We did take it for granted because when you’re bored it was like, “Let’s go to The Palms. It’s always there.”

HAILEY: You’d kind of go there on a lark, but it wouldn’t be thought of that way today. We would be so grateful. Please come back. We have nothing anymore. I had some great fun nights at The Palms. 

MOENNIG: Then I remember on Thursday nights or Friday nights, everyone went to Truck Stop, next door to the Abbey.

HAILEY: Now we’re boring everyone.

MOENNIG: Sorry.

HAILEY: Okay, you know how Shane was a sex symbol? Do you think there’s anyone like that today?

MOENNIG: Probably. Do I have to name someone specific?

HAILEY: No. 

MOENNIG: It’s not like I’m out of touch, but I’m not well-versed in what the new hot thing is either.

HAILEY: I’m not either. I mean, I think maybe because you stuck out in a way that I don’t know is even possible anymore. There weren’t many people doing it, so the landscape was wide open to pack a punch, and now it’s like, “Good luck getting noticed anywhere in the world.”

MOENNIG: Yeah, I guess she made a difference because she didn’t fall into that binary description we were just talking about. Who would be that today?

HAILEY: I think the answer is you don’t know.

MOENNIG: But I know they’re out there.

HAILEY: Is there something in life that you are still learning about today that you want to figure out?

MOENNIG: I need to figure out how to tailor my own pants. I really want to learn how to use a sewing machine.

HAILEY: Why?

MOENNIG: Because I don’t like going to the tailor.

HAILEY: I thought you loved going to the tailor.

MOENNIG: I go to the tailor because I can’t do it myself. I know exactly what I need to do, but I don’t have the fancy words that a tailor needs to describe such a thing, and then I’ll get the pants back and I’m not totally happy. And that’s because I don’t know how to describe that in tailorspeak.

HAILEY: Because you tailor all your pants, right?

MOENNIG: Yeah. Do you ever wear a pair of pants that are perfect? Do you have that life?

HAILEY: I just hope for the best when I put them on. But I think people that go to tailors always look better. I need to learn that.

MOENNIG: I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. That’s why it’s fun working on a show because you can take your items to the costume designer’s tailor, and they know your body and how you communicate and how you like something to fit and you get it for free.

HAILEY: That’s why I looked so great in these suits on the show because they would tailor them. That is not what I thought you were going to say, but I love this for you. We had to learn how to sew in school.

MOENNIG: Were you in high school in the 1950s?

HAILEY: In the ’80s, in junior high, we all learned to cook, which I obviously didn’t. We learned to sew. We had to sew a dress at the end of the year. I have pictures of me in the dress I made.

MOENNIG: Couldn’t you have taken a wood shop or a mechanics class? 

HAILEY: I could have, but I don’t think girls were in those classes.

MOENNIG: That’s sexist. You could have broken the mold and said, “I’m joining.”

HAILEY: I think I was at the point in my life where I was just doing what I was told in school. Anyway, maybe I know what to get you for your birthday. Have we ever overlapped in our dating pool? We haven’t, right?

MOENNIG: I mean, you’ve tried to make me go out on dates with people that you just wanted to know about but you were in a relationship. Like, “Just go out with them and tell me what it’s like.”

HAILEY: Wait, wait, wait. Not for me. You made it sound like I liked someone and I needed you to go out with them.

MOENNIG: Oh, no. But you were like, “That person’s really cute. If I was single, I’d go for them. Kate, tell me all about it.”

HAILEY: Right, I lived vicariously through you. But you weren’t on a reconnaissance mission for me.

MOENNIG: No, I was not.

HAILEY: And we’ve steered clear of overlapping any exes.

MOENNIG: We have never shared one ex.

HAILEY: I have a friend who just called me this morning, who dated someone probably 30 years ago, but her friend is dating the ex now and she’s upset about it. 

MOENNIG: Who cares?

HAILEY: Because it was her ex-girlfriend, but it’s also one of her good friends.

MOENNIG: One thing I’ll say about getting older is that I stopped giving a shit about little things. That’s a perfect example. That’s something that maybe would’ve stuck in my craw 20 years ago, and now I just think, “Who cares?”

HAILEY: Well, I guess it would be similar to if I was single and I went out with one of your ex-girlfriends, but didn’t tell you for a while. Wouldn’t that bug you a little bit?

MOENNIG: No.

HAILEY: Imagine any one of your exes, pick one. And all of a sudden, I tell you after the fact, like, “Hey, Kate, me and so-and-so are dating.”

MOENNIG: I genuinely would not care.

HAILEY: Wow. You wouldn’t gross out?

MOENNIG: No, I wouldn’t. Would you be upset?

HAILEY: I don’t think I’d like it.

MOENNIG: Really?

HAILEY: Yeah. Well, it’s twofold. One, something would be gross about it. And two, I would be like, “Now I have to spend time with my ex-girlfriend.”

MOENNIG: That’s a bummer.

HAILEY: That would suck.

MOENNIG: Well, mercifully, Leisha, that line has never been crossed. And now that we’re both married, it never will.

HAILEY: Exactly.

MOENNIG: I love you very much.

HAILEY: I love you too.

MOENNIG: Happy book launch.

HAILEY: Congratulations. Job well done.

MOENNIG: Are we going to start the sequel in like, a week or two?

HAILEY: I think we need a good 10 to 20 new experiences. The real book is the tell-all we could have written.

MOENNIG: Which we didn’t, so we don’t get sued.