Jesus Fuck, I Am Begging You: No More Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe Photoshoots
Please, for the love of God, no more photoshoots of Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe. I am on my knees, begging the powers that be. Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe are the hottest couple on earth, but I can’t take another of these bizarre and ill-conceived high-concept photoshoots they keep getting ensnared in.
The first time it happened, I assumed it was a fluke. Photographed for InStyle Magazine in September 2019, they appear in brightly colored jumpsuits with — and you’re gonna wanna be sitting down for this — Sue sitting on a counter, Megan standing between her legs, applying lipstick to Sue’s mouth. APPLYING. LIPSTICK. TO HER MOUTH.
This picture rattled me to my core. It’s that deeply troubling. The image wanted to tell me something…but what? Every time I looked at it again, I recoiled in anguish before I could hear its message. For weeks, I saw it whenever I closed my eyes. I don’t know why this picture had me so unsettled, but I know I wasn’t alone. Several friends confirmed that they had similarly visceral reactions to the cursed image.
“Seriously haunting,” my friend Sarah said. “Made me feel sick to my stomach.”
Rachel agreed: “It looks like someone who has never met a lesbian was trying to come up with what lesbians do together that would be sexy but more family friendly, and they settled on applying each other’s lipstick.”
Over a year later, the photograph only kept me up about once a month, down from my previous four times a week. I had mostly shaken it off and was managing to live a normal life in spite of the grotesque image burned into my brain.
But last week, GQ’s Modern Love March issue was revealed to be featuring the couple in yet another bizarre lesbian fever dream of a photoshoot.
And now I have to ask…………just what the hell is going on?
On a beach, photographed in black and white, Sue appears almost entirely nude, sitting in the sand, legs outstretched in front of her. A fully clothed Megan Rapinoe is wrapped around her like a spider monkey, fully clothed all in black with knee-high lace-up combat boots. On…the beach. It’s not that she doesn’t look smokin’ hot, because she does. It’s not that I don’t want her to bash my head against a glass coffee table, because I do, believe me, I do. But the look is so incongruous with the beach, and not in a satisfying way, and then it’s against Sue’s naked body, and the whole effect just reeeeally makes me squirm. I don’t know how else to say it: the vibes are just really bad.
This is mystifying to me. Both of them are otherworldly levels of hot, I truly could stare at them for hours (and have). Sue and Megan looking cozy while lounging courtside at a basketball game? Cute! Sue and Megan posing casually in front of a step-and-repeat? Stunning goddesses! I drool over the real-life photos of them like anyone else, feverishly texting them to my gay girl besties for obsessive analysis and appreciation.
It’s the photoshoots. It’s the damn high-concept photoshoots that are the arbiters of sapphic nightmares.
Who is directing these photoshoots? I decided to find out.
For the lipstick one: Beau Grealy. The photographer’s work is beautiful, but I can’t seem to find his face anywhere on the internet. His eyes, I need his eyes. I want to stare into them, try to find the rotten thing within him that makes him think this shoot was a good idea. Oh Beau…what have you done? I want to find the place in his brain where Satan has made a home and convinced him to commit this crime against me and me specifically.
Is this the result of a man not knowing how to photograph a lesbian relationship? I wondered. But this theory fell apart under closer scrutiny — the GQ Modern Love photoshoot was by Sam Taylor-Johnson — a woman!
Every article about the pair bestows some gushing superlative about them in its title: Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe are “couple goals” and “everything” and “the power couple of the century.” And they are. In so many ways, they are. Both star athletes. Amazing lesbian representation in professional sports. Their activist endeavors and advocacy for racial justice. They are absolutely couple goals, and that’s what makes this all so hard to swallow.
Rachel floated a theory: “They are both so beautiful, but stylists seem to have no idea what to do with them, and I think it’s a hangup on styling athletes and/or gays. Do they make them femme? Glam it up? Lean into athleisure?! It always ends up looking so costumey and awkward and leaves you feeling unsettled, like they’ve been put into clothes that don’t fit.”
I think she’s probably right, but it’s hard not to feel like this whole thing is a targeted conspiracy against me.
Whatever the reason, I think I speak for all of us when I say I can’t handle a third in this stomach-turning series. Photographers and creative directors, we beseech you: put Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe in sweeping dresses, sleek cropped pants, rich velvets, smooth leather…literally anything you want, they’re the sexiest women in the world! Just please…lose the lipstick, and the strange, contrived poses. Make both of them the same amount of clothed. Meet some lesbians even one time, I don’t know. Please. We, and more specifically, I, have suffered enough.
