a year in review
2024 in queer advice and TV Dinners
Happy New Years, everyone. 2024 was a year for me. There were many good things at the core, but it was filled with all kinds of admin and hard work. Psychically I’m so tired, I watched Irish Wish last night and thought Lindsay Lohan was great in it. Anyways, thank you so much for your attention and support. It’s truly the miracle of my life that so many people read this newsletter, let alone pay me to write it. I’m grateful and humbled and motivated to keep going. I compiled my most banger posts of the past year and hope you’ll take a look.
xoxo, Maddy from the Substack mines
the most popular queer advice columns of 2024
I’m definitely overdue for a long, reflective personal essay on my life as a dyke agony aunt, lol. 24 hours after you publish a post on Substack, the app provides you with a terrifying array of analytics that I mostly choose not to look at BUT here are the most popular queer advice columns of 2024 based on revenue and open rates. “Likes” are not a meaningful metric on Substack, not yet anyways.
#76: my ex has so much power over people “When my ex and I broke up, we made a deal to tell each other when we started a new “serious” relationship, a pact which i now regret…“
#80: PLAGUED "HOW DO YOU GO BACK IN TIME AND NEVER MEET ANYONE?”
#81: lonely butch4butch top “I feel off-the-chain bananas drool-emoji levels of attraction to fellow mascs, and I just want to feel that same intensity reflected back at me: I want to feel like people are actively attracted to my presentation, as well as my personality or whatever…“
#90: ex-wife “She has expressed hating me, and her anger at me, which is completely fair and valid. I hurt her deeply, and I will continue to pay the price for it literally and figuratively for probably the rest of my life…“
#92: close queer people I get asked all the time what the top concerns people write into queer advice are about and it’s definitely questions that are like, “I need to break up with my partner or friend, or otherwise communicate something difficult and potentially relationship-ending and I’m scared of the emotional fallout.“ A vague category! A close second is people who are wondering how to make friends. This response is my ultimate primer to making friends as an adult. Spoiler alert: it’s hard!
#93: ingredients guy “I’ve been with my partner for three years, and we’re really compatible in so many ways. We share a lot of important values, and I see a long-term future together. But as we get more serious, I’m noticing some tensions arise for me around finances and spending habits…“
I went back to my hometown in July and found my 5th grade diary. This was written on NYE 2002 and is a testament to my unsupported childhood anxiety and also the War on Irag
queer author interviews 📚
In 2024, I interviewed Davey Davis, Chloé Caldwell, Laura Chow Reeve, Nina Katz, Myriam Lacroix, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Sol J Brager, adrienne maree brown, and Faythe Levine about their new books. Everyone is so smart and funny and a total genius, so there’s no way I can choose one interview over another. Read them all in quick succession here.
personal non-fiction 📺
posts about buying a home, dog ownership, and my life in Vermont
the hell list: a long post that I wrote after a very bad week
lesbian studies ✂️ 🍔
relevant to lesbians and fans of lesbians
The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara: a roundtable on lesbian cyberterrorism with Clover and Julia from the
newsletterIn April, I released Choose Your Own Dykeventure: Country Living, a follow-up to 2020’s Choose Your Own Dykeventure zine. I had so much fun mailing out orders and it made me want to revive my zinemaking practice, even though printing and postage are so expensive now…
And that’s all! I hope everyone has fun celebrating NYE tonight—maybe you’re out partying like a G6, or at home watching movies or doing fiber art with cat hair. Maybe you have to work because you’re a nurse or custodian and society cannot function without your labor…but no matter what you get up to tonight, thank you so much for reading TV Dinner :) More in 2025!
Oh my god, I just remembered a half-assed diary entry the night of the Gore-Bush election. (I know results took ages due to…everything, but I was so morose and convinced Bush won. I was right!) I found that diary years later with nothing in it but that entry sometime during the Obama era. I remember naively chuckling as I threw it away, feeling very assured that “it gets better.” Yikes.
Happy New Year! So happy to be a subscriber. Enjoying my copies of the dykeventure zines as I recover from a New Year’s hysterectomy✨. Wishing you and your partner and your pups a wonderful new year!
Shoutout to childhood anxiety in the early/mid-2000s; in one of my elementary diaries, I wrote about the 2008 "receshon"