From co-stars on The L Word to podcasting partners, forever best friends Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig are now co-authors of a memoir.
June 19, 2025
Back in the halcyon days of the early aughts, a first job as a reporter for an LGBT+ newspaper in Washington, DC, wasn’t exactly a plum posting for a young lesbian writer just out of Columbia Journalism School in New York—no matter the prospects for dating. There were the four-article-per-week deadlines, the trips to Capitol Hill to report on the progress of George W. Bush’s Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a disastrous war going on in Iraq, and, last but not least, the cultural desert that was Northwest Washington: the opposite of my life in 2001–2004 downtown New York City and Brooklyn. There, hanging at the lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson with the musician LP in her salad days as a bartender, watching friends gig at the Mercury Lounge, and meeting some up-and-coming writer or other at a Vanity Fair party were regular happenings.
But in the dead of winter 2004, a whisper campaign started among the lesbians in and around Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan: watch parties on Sunday nights, nine in the evening—sharp. Come to this person’s group house, which can afford the cable network Showtime, and BYOB. There was a new show out, The L Word, and it was about us! Lesbians! And supposedly it wasn’t another sexless indie shot in black and white or a documentary that explored the life of the lesbian in the wild. My young girlfriend at the time, an intern at the Washington Blade where I worked, received an invitation to one. Having seen the extra-large Showtime The L Word billboards around Times Square, I decided to tag along, you know, for posterity. Although the thought did cross my mind: What did some uppity Los Angeles series have to teach this lesbian journalist about this life? We had overpriced, diluted drinks; Lil Wayne–blaring lesbian nights on 17th Street; lots of awkward dancing; and dramatic breakups, too.
With all this swirling in my head, I walked into the living room of one of those houses on January 18, 2004, to find about twenty-five lesbians glued to the television, sipping Miller Lite, and shushing anyone who dared disrupt the dialogue or a sex scene. Pre–Blue Is the Warmest Color, The L Word was probably the most graphic lesbian lovemaking any of us Gen-Xers had ever seen outside of our own fumbling bedroom efforts. All of us that night took mental notes and told our girlfriends we could do it better. And then, of course, we laughed at the glamorous apartments, houses, and clothes these women managed to afford. Still, no manner of disagreement on plot lines; the writer character, Jenny; Shane’s looks; or Catherine Opie’s photography could keep us away, the following Sunday night, from joining the nine o’clock watch party at someone else’s group house with another gaggle of lesbians, drinking another six-pack, and watching the sturm und drang unfold.
My January night with The L Word franchise has now stretched into my longest lesbian relationship. After I returned to New York following a year and change in DC, I picked up some friends and drove them to packed L Word watch parties at Cattyshack, the hottest lesbian bar in Brooklyn, full of women who literally stopped dancing to watch the cast do it on television. I spent many a lonely night in my older (and also gay) brother’s East Hampton guest house with spirits lifted because I could click through The L Word re-runs and indulge in Dana and Alice’s short-lived love affair, dreaming that theirs could be mine, too. I have introduced French and Italian girlfriends to the delicious American pulp of LA lesbian life. And I have wagered money and personal pride on the odds that Kate Moennig (pronounced Men-ig) was gay and had heated discussions about the reasons why network execs would hire a known lesbian, Leisha Hailey, to play a bisexual. I wouldn’t exactly say that we East Coast lesbians lived The L Word, but man, did it get our attention.
Turns out, as I was having my own lived L Word experience, Hailey and Moennig were navigating the particulars of being two of the first lesbian cast members hired on a revolutionary series. Now, wait a sec: revolutionary is not flip, as illustrated in the pair’s new book So Gay for You: Friendship, Found Family and the Show that Started it All (St Martin’s Press, 2025), the original series’ five-season run on Showtime, and the three-round 2019 reboot called The L Word: Generation Q. Amid a topsy-turvy, turbulent, nearly ten years in total, The L Word introduced us all to the possibility of LGBT parenthood, the coming reality of transgenderism, the horror of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy in Iraq, power lesbians, and queer substance abuse, among many other things. And damn, besides Betty (a band I respected, but for which musically, I cared little), the show had some fantastic cameos: Sleater Kenney in its heyday, Snoop Dogg, the B-52s, Teagan and Sara, as well as non-band celebrities Gloria Steinem, Billie Jean King, the eponymous newspaper-ess Ariana Huffington, the veteran Black actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, comedian Sandra Bernhard, Lolita Davidovich, and Rosanna Arquette.
“The Pants pair continues to serve as an inspiration to lesbians around the world, from the twenty-somethings on the Hackney Women’s Football Club to the Gen-Xer, late-in-life lesbians raising children in North London.”
— Adrian Margaret Brune
Could Hailey and Moennig each have written their own memoirs? Both have the backstories—Moennig with her East Coast/West Coast “tale of two cities” and Hailey with her “down and out in [Lincoln] and New York”—to pull it off. But if each went her separate way in print, it just wouldn’t be true to the duo’s nickname and now brand, Pants, bestowed by Mia Kirchner, who plays Jenny in The L Word. As Kirchner said, “You can’t have one leg without the other.” As a result, So Gay for You—the book title is surprisingly off-brand—is told in a back-and-forth narrative (Kate says, Leisha says) that stays true to both actors’ voices: sweet Nebraska Midwestern for Hailey, with a wicked bite thrown in now and again, and Philadelphia street-tough, “youse, cawfee, Philly, Italian ice, Wawa” for Moennig. (On the podcast, Hailey does a hilarious imitation of Moennig and her East Coast judiciousness.) The pair have been asked countless times if they ever dated, and in reading So Gay for You, it’s pretty obvious that if so, they could have been the next Joan Didion/John Gregory Dunne or a cautionary tale for, ahem, The L Word.
The Pants book begins with Hailey recounting a 2003 barbecue in the Hollywood Hills and reminiscing about the days when her band, The Murmurs, had a hit record, a touring schedule, and a firm future. Moennig chimes in for chapter two and tells of her humble acting beginnings 5,000 miles away in New York—newly graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Hailey attended six years before Moennig) and jumping from job to job to make ends meet. Both actors needed steady work; both had just auditioned for a pilot written by veteran TV producer and Golden Globe–winner Ilene Chaiken called “Earthlings”; both were competing for the same role: Shane, the libertine heartbreaker among a group of close-knit Los Angeles friends, lovers, frenemies, and exes. Hailey, blonde and femme-ish, put on her best butch and even brought a hair comb to prove she could play the straight-talking, hair-dressing Euripides of Hollywood. Moennig, who had come from a show-business family (her mother is former Broadway dancer Mary Zahn, her aunt is Blythe Danner, and her cousin is Gwyneth Paltrow), but who was also a lapsed Catholic schoolgirl rebelling against the Philly world of old-money Mayflower types, turned up as a version of herself.
Moennig nailed the role of Shane, and Hailey considered a return to music. But Chaiken called Hailey shortly after the audition. She had Hailey in mind for a role that suited the actor’s natural buoyancy better: Alice Pieszecki, a gossipy, bisexual alt-news journalist and the Laurel to Moennig’s Hardy. Early in the original series, the pair played the Greek chorus to the love lives of art curator Bette (Jennifer Beals of Fame notoriety, whose own photographic book about The L Word is now out) and movie-executive-turned-mother Tina (Laurel Holloman), as well as closeted tennis pro Dana (Erin Daniels) and, of course, aspiring writer Jenny, who sucked all the air out of the room as she struggled with being a nice, Jewish, Chicago girl gone gay. Eventually, Chaiken and showrunner Rose Troche brought Hailey and Moennig more into the series, and arcs formed around their own stories. When not filming, everyone was navigating the shoots in Vancouver, British Columbia, which subbed in as a cheaper Los Angeles, and the expenses of being jobbing actors. Hailey, Moennig, and Kirchner even saved money by renting a house together. “When I got to Canada to film the pilot, I was broke,” Moennig writes about her hand-to-mouth days. “I didn’t even have a credit card to put down for incidentals, just an ATM card with maybe forty dollars on it. Per diems were our saving grace.”
Hailey: “My first official task as Alice was to go for a wardrobe fitting. . . . Without much conversation, the costumer handed me a pair of pants with a stampede of horses across the leg and declared, ‘These are great!’ I walked the slacks back to my trailer with the enthusiasm of someone walking the plank of a pirate ship. . . . Was I allowed to say no? . . . I mustered all my courage and suggested to the costumer that we put the horses out to pasture.”
Already a tight, conscientious cast due to the nature of the controversy the show stirred up during a reawakening of hard-core right-wing America, Hailey and Moennig nonetheless became particularly close. Even before we gaydar-focused watchers and the media (both the LGBT and straight) speculated about, cajoled, and even harassed Moennig to publicly come out as gay, she had told her own parents, including her cancer-suffering father, the violin maker William H. Moennig III. “I genuinely thought my mom would be okay with it. I really did,” Moennig writes. After all, her mom had been in show business. “’You’re just being influenced,’ I recall her saying. ‘It’s just a phase.’ . . . I wish I had timed it all better.” Moennig blamed herself, despite knowing that everyone had their own “gay timeline.” A few months after the premiere of the show, William H. Moennig died, going from the ER to the ICU and never returning. Hailey was the best friend to pick up the pieces. She even became Moennig’s unofficial spokesperson. Leisha “knew the strain I was under and the grief I was barely dealing with. Losing my dad was not in the bingo card for 2004, and that struggle became intertwined with the process of coming out and the overnight attention the show was getting,” Moennig writes.
Hailey, who is Heartland friendly but also guarded, writes about her upbringing as an Air Force brat born in Japan, settling with her parents surrounded by small towns and, on occasion, smaller minds, then fleeing at age eighteen to New York to make music as fast as she could. Acting was a side hustle. For the first time, she speaks openly and candidly about her deceased mother and the wing-lifting effect she had on Hailey’s young life. “Living in rural Nebraska, a red state, you might assume my parents were conservative,” Hailey writes. But the opposite was true. “Although my dad was in the military, he was a guitar-playing, chess-loving bookworm who was also a proud atheist. And while I don’t think my mom would have referred to herself as a feminist, she instilled in me and my sister competence, independence, and a belief that we could do anything we put our minds to”—despite suffering from Multiple Sclerosis for most of Hailey’s life. That quiet resilience included not saying a thing when leaving her youngest daughter in pre-Giuliani-crime-crackdown New York, in the middle of a drug epidemic. Hailey’s mother, who resembled her daughter down to the shape of her eyes, died in 2017.
Over twenty years after The L Word’s premiere, the Pants pair has survived the ups and downs of network television’s show-business life through Covid, the SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike, and the unfortunate end of The L Word: Generation Q, all while hanging on with a New Yorker grip to their friendship and the Covid-project podcast, Pants. Since going on air, Hailey and Moennig have been through indie production company after indie producer, supporting the show with their own savings, courting Spotify, and then finally landing at Lemonada Media.
Some dish, which all lesbians love, is thrown into So Gay for You, including the public snog between Hailey and her Uh Huh Her bandmate Camila Grey that got both kicked off a flight on the runway in El Paso, Texas. The electro-pop band had not yet learned their lesson that no matter how inexpensive or faux friendly, never fly Southwest. But after it publicly blew up in the tabloids—and was reported by the Associated Press, of all media—Hailey vigorously campaigned for her right to kiss her girlfriends wherever she wanted. Other than that, neither explicitly identifies their various paramours before Moennig quietly backed out of the “is she or isn’t she gay” public debate and ended all talk by marrying filmmaker and musician Ana Rezende in 2017. Hailey finally disclosed her rekindled relationship with Kim Dickens of the AMC franchise The Walking Dead—an actor she first met and dated while living in New York City in the 1990s.
The book doesn’t have Hailey completing Moennig’s sentences or vice versa, as they pretty much do in real life. On a recent promotional podcast with Chelsea Handler, Moennig said: “I think the perception outside of our show is that it was so—it was only designed for the male gaze, and that was a lot of critique we always heard. Everyone thought, Oh, it’s only for straight men to get off on . . . and the irony is that the whole show is run by women.”
“And written by and directed by,” Hailey chimed in.
Moennig continued, “You said this before”—she points to Hailey—“and it’s true, that women can sexualize each other as well. It wasn’t just for—”
“And objectify,” Hailey added.
“And objectify each other. And it’s not just for men. . . . We, on the show, always thought, That’s so off base actually to what’s really going on here.”
A book by Hailey just wouldn’t, at this stage in our lives, feel complete without Moennig, and vice versa. Together, the Pants pair has written a light, fast, entertaining book that elevates lesbians’ lives, just like the show that launched their public lives. And the thing that does matter about The L Word, the Pants podcast, and now the book is that they stand up against the second coming of right-wingers who (still) want to pull the LGBT community apart. The Pants pair continues to serve as an inspiration to lesbians around the world, from the twenty-somethings on the Hackney Women’s Football Club to the Gen-Xer, late-in-life lesbians raising children in North London. This Pants’ pocket is pretty much permanently attached.
Since 2001, A.M. Brune has reported and written hundreds of freelance articles from pitch to print for publications, such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Spectator publications on a variety of topics, including world affairs, social justice, human rights and culture. A former UN press officer, Brune holds a BS in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University in the City of New York and an MA in Global Diplomacy from SOAS. She often brings along a camera on assignments.