Moonie is Putting Butch Lesbians at the Forefront

Sisters Moonie and Jess Desvarieux joined forces last year to create their webseries Moonie: Entirely self funded on Seed&Spark and written and directed by themselves it’s clear their creative vision is strong. Moonie is a Seinfeld inspired comedy about day to day life. It’s about trying to find joy in life despite the microaggressions, dating drama and job woes that a group of 30 something, black, queer pals in New York City experience.

They’ve just been nominated for a Queerty award for best webseries (you can vote for them here, no personal info needed to cast your vote either!) and their screenplay they also wrote together, Butch Baba Mama, was a finalist in Stage 32's Comedy Screenwriting Competition in 2022. It’s clear the sibling duo are destined for greatness and the Moonie web series is just the start. Polyester Managing Editor Eden sat down with them to discuss screenwriting, YouTube, performative activism, butch representation in cinema (hello Cate Blanchett in a suit in Tár) and more.

Hiya! The Moonie web series has just been nominated for a Queerty award for best webseries - how do you feel?

Jess: Oh, my gosh, we are just over the moon. I'm on cloud nine. This was just an idea and to be here with our completed project that’s now nominated for a Queerty Award. It’s exceeded our expectations! The funny thing is that neither of us applied. We just found out without even sending an application off and were told we’d been nominated. We’re just so humbled and honoured to be a part of it.

Moonie: An actual red carpet event! We can’t wait to get our finest threads on.

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

You’re with some other amazing creators and comedians in your category too. With making your home on YouTube, with so much content out there, it must be great to be recognised by a platform like the Queerty awards who can boost your platform and shine a light on your work because sometimes platforms like YouTube feel oversaturated and your work can get lost amongst the crowd.

Jess: YouTube is hard because it’s not necessarily a home. It feels like when you land in a new place and they have a tourist type of Welcome Centre and people are doing all types of things to try and grab your attention. I feel like YouTube is kind of that place. So we don't feel quite as settled on the YouTube platform because there's just so much content. It’s hard to have your voice heard out there! So we'd love to find a production company and a home that really understands our point of view and our mission with the work that we do. But in terms of using it as a testing ground to show people “here we are, here's our voice, this is our tone and this is what we can do with limited resources.” it's a useful place.

TV shows like Insecure, Broad City, Workaholics and Portlandia all started online as web series but kept their DIY roots when they moved onto television. What would you want to explore  thematically or story wise, if you could go on to make more series?

Moonie: We’d keep the characters as is but expand their world. Like Broad City we’d want it to be single camera and allow the characters to really explore the city, rather than staying in a closed off set in a studio. We would still keep the essence of the show the same for sure. We want to create fun, joy, laughter but show it through the lenses of marginalised people, such as women, black people and people from the queer community. In Hollywood, those groups have not gotten the attention they deserve and have not been placed in the best of light. And there's often a heaviness with portraying marginalised people onscreen. We want to move away from the character tropes that we’ve all grown accustomed to throughout the years in Hollywood.

Jess: We actually have an idea for a feature film too! We wrote a screenplay together over COVID called Butch Baby Mama. It essentially takes place in the same world as our web series takes place in. It's about a sister who asks her masculine presenting sister to be her surrogate. And the craziness that ensues when she’s trying to be this aspiring comedian who also takes on this role of also carrying this child for her sister. We want to highlight queer voices, black voices and women and make them the main protagonists for all of our stories, because that's our point of view.

You nail that in the web series too. A lot of queer stories, especially lesbian stories, always end in something horrible happening. Someone has to die, or has to go through a devastating heartbreak. Moonie shows that it’s not all doom and gloom!

Jess: Yeah! We gotta be able to laugh at ourselves, the absurdity of life, the awkwardness that comes with life just try to have fun.

You can tell you guys had a lot of fun making it. Were you friends with the cast before? Or is it a fresh friendship? The energy feels natural and that you’ve been friends for a while.

Jess: It was so serendipitous. We knew only one person prior. That's the character of Lesley, played by Glo Butler. She's a comedian who works the New York circuit with Farah. We found everyone else online. It was the weirdest experience, I felt like I was meeting my imaginary friends! The cast totally embodied these characters Moonie and I created in our minds.

It must be so special to work on something together as sisters too?

Jess: It really was. I don't think there's anyone that you fight more with and your sibling but you're able to kiss and make up so easily. The creative process is a vulnerable one so it’s great working with someone who you trust to tell you like it is. I think as siblings, that's the beauty. We're sisters, we have this trust but also have this sense of accountability with each other. It’s good for writing comedy too because we grew up around the same films and have the same sense of humour. We love anything from the 90s, Seinfeld, Adam Sandler films. Hey we might try and reboot Sister Sister next!

Moonie: I heard they’re rebooting Ghost. You can’t reboot that. That’s a resurrection!

It must be frustrating to see old media and stories being rehashed and remade. You have this original creative story and yet they just want to remake Ghost.

Jess: It’s because they’re scared.

Moonie: We were just talking about this earlier this morning. This world of Hollywood is founded upon the bedrock of supposed imagination. And yet the quote unquote “gatekeepers” who hold the purse strings seem to lack that imagination when it comes to new projects. That was a major drive for us to create this web series. It's sort of like a prequel to our Butch Baby Mama screenplay. We wanted to have something tangible about the world we want to create, to show people so they didn't have to rely on their imaginations and that we have six episodes that reflect the vibe we want to put out.

Yeah something I loved about the series is you’re putting butch lesbians at the forefront of the storyline. But it’s not a dramatic storyline or anything, it’s integral to the characters identities but they’re just existing as themselves. We’re lacking butch representation in the media! I just watched Tár and there’s this incredible scene where Cate Blanchett gets a custom suit made and I loved that focus on the butch experience. Who are some of your favourite butch characters on screen?

Moonie: Yeah there isn't enough butch representation in TV and cinema. And then with a lot of depictions there’s also a heaviness associated with it, a sort of doom and gloom. Often they're kind of made fun of and the butt of the joke rather than leading the joke. But I love Wanda Sykes, Fortune Feimster. Comedian Sam Jay too! She’s been blowing up recently. Then you’ve got the OG Lea DeLaria. I actually met her in P town this past summer and she's just so talented. She’s been on Broadway, she can sing, she can dance. She was born to be an entertainer.

“The work often requires relinquishing power, paying it forward and acknowledging that you can create space and opportunities for other people. So within the micro aggressions we depict on Moonie, there’s obviously deeper messages there as well.”

I love the scene in the series where Kym is sitting in an empty coffee shop and some guy sits at her table and completely invades her personal space in the rudest way. Then when he gets his laptop out he’s got a Black Lives Matter sticker on there. What do you think about performative activism?

Jess: I’m so glad you asked about this. That story is true! It happened to me! Instead of the Black Lives Matter sticker he had a Human Rights Campaign sticker. I was like “Oh, my God, I cannot believe this.” It really felt like something out of Seinfeld and that really inspired the show. We thought, let’s do a show about these types of confrontations that we have day to day, these microaggressions that we experience.

I genuinely believe that man probably gives to the Human Rights Campaign and believes in their issues. But I think that often around queer issues, black issues, being anti patriarchy, etc, people aren't really willing to do the work. The work often requires relinquishing power, paying it forward and acknowledging that you can create space and opportunities for other people. So within the micro aggressions we depict on Moonie, there’s obviously deeper messages there as well. If people walk away from the show and start thinking about these tensions that exist in our world on a deeper level then that’s amazing. But we also want to give people a great laugh too!

You can watch the full Moonie web series here and vote for them in the Queerty awards here.

Words: Eden Young | Interviewees: Moonie Desvarieux and Jess Desvarieux