On paper, Gilmore Girls was peak WB hetero comfort viewing: a single mom raising her daughter, a revolving door of boyfriends, and a quirky New England town that felt like the Hallmark Channel had swallowed a snow globe. But beneath the latte foam and the ABBA-fast banter was something queerer than Stars Hollow ever dared to say out loud. Lorelai and Sookie weren’t just friends. They weren’t just business partners. They were sapphic co-parents raising a precocious teen in a town where the real drag show happened at every town hall meeting.

The queerness of Gilmore Girls isn’t about overt storylines — it’s in the rhythm, the intimacy, the way characters orbit each other. Lorelai and Rory’s mother-daughter bond was famously codependent, but Lorelai and Sookie’s friendship took it one step further.

They dreamed a future together, literally built an inn from the ground up, and filled each other’s days with affection disguised as jokes. They bickered like wives and made up like wives. Luke was technically “endgame,” Jackson was technically “the husband,” but the chemistry that never dimmed was Lorelai and Sookie’s — one coffee-fueled, one sugar-rushed, both spinning entire lives around each other.

When you watch in 2025, you realise: this wasn’t just small-town charm. It was queer intimacy masquerading as sitcom friendship.

There’s nothing straighter on the surface than “two women open a bed-and-breakfast.” But on TV? That’s gay marriage with extra carbs. The Dragonfly Inn wasn’t just a business venture — it was a domestic dream home. Sookie in the kitchen, Lorelai running the front desk, Rory rolling her eyes at both of them like the teenager of two moms who talk too fast.

The inn reads less like a capitalist venture and more like sapphic cohabitation. Lorelai and Sookie weren’t building careers. They were building a life together, a safe house on the edge of Stars Hollow where the door was always open, the coffee pot was always on, and the vibe was “lesbian brunch meets town gossip cabaret.”

While Lorelai and Sookie played at plausible deniability, Michel was living the camp truth. He wasn’t “coded gay.” He was gay, full stop, in the way only early-2000s network TV would let you be: cutting sarcasm, fabulous disdain, and an endless devotion to dogs and spa treatments.

In retrospect, Michel is the glue that makes the Dragonfly Inn not just a workplace but a queer space. He is the shade to their earnestness, the diva energy that tips the whole dynamic from cozy sitcom into found-family camp. In 2025, the show wouldn’t bury him in subtext. He’d be out, dating, maybe raising a French bulldog with his boyfriend in town.

Of course, the teens weren’t spared the queerness either. Rory’s real romance arc was never Dean, Jess, or Logan. It was Paris Geller.

Their study sessions carried more erotic charge than any Gilmore boyfriend subplot. The forced cohabitation at Yale was sapphic romcom set-up in disguise: Paris storming in with armfuls of notes, Rory shrinking under the intensity, both of them falling into a rhythm that felt more like a marriage than a dorm arrangement. When Paris barked, “I need you,” in season 4, it wasn’t academic. It was a queer confession dressed up as neurotic ambition.

If Netflix rebooted Gilmore Girls today, Rory/Paris would’ve been canon. The tension was already there. The lines just needed less plausible deniability.

Even beyond the core cast, Stars Hollow itself was a queer ecosystem. Kirk reinventing himself every week in new professions? That’s drag. Taylor staging elaborate town hall meetings about candy canes? Drag. Miss Patty’s dance studio? Drag with jazz hands. The town’s entire identity was camp excess — a place where performance was community and every character exaggerated themselves into theatre.

For queer viewers, this wasn’t just comfort TV. It was recognition. Small-town weirdness coded as drag cabaret. Intimacy coded as chosen family. Queer excess hiding under the sugar coating.

Rewatching Gilmore Girls now, the queerness hums louder than the pop culture references. It’s in the way Lorelai prioritises her partnership with Sookie over any romance. It’s in Rory’s crackling tension with Paris. It’s in Michel’s refusal to play straight, ever. And it’s in the camp theatre of Stars Hollow itself — where everyone was already in drag whether they knew it or not.

The WB marketed Gilmore Girls as straight comfort TV, but what they accidentally gave us was queer utopia in flannel, aprons, and coffee mugs the size of flowerpots.

Gilmore Girls wasn’t about who Lorelai ended up with. It was about the queer intimacy she’d already built: a codependent daughter, a co-parent business partner, a flamboyant inn manager, and a town of eccentrics who kept the stage lights burning.

The show sold itself as hetero coziness, but let’s be real: Lorelai and Sookie were wives. Rory and Paris were star-crossed. Michel was family. And Stars Hollow was the campiest small-town drag revue in WB history.

Because if you watched with queer eyes, Gilmore Girls was never straight. It was just playing it that way on TV.