Sex and the City is one of the most influential television shows ever. Celebrity cameos became a fixture of the show throughout its six-season run; however, you’d be hard-pressed to find one as memorable as Alanis Morissette in Season 3. The “You Oughta Know” singer may have appeared in only a single episode; however, her impact cannot be overstated.
Morissette was an avid viewer of Sex and the City, like so many others. After watching Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw struggling with yet another relationship, she reached out to the writers and put her name forward as one of Carrie’s potential love interests.
The Story Behind Alanis Morissette’s Surprisingly Important ‘Sex and the City’ Cameo
“I reached out to them, and I said, ‘Might it be a nice time for Carrie to experience a lesbian moment?’” Morissette recalled, laughing, on Call Her Daddy. “And they said, ‘Why yes, we were thinking the same thing!’”
Host Alex Cooper stressed the importance of seeing LGBTQ+ representation on television at the time and how rare it was. She then asks Morissette how it feels to be part of a big moment like that. “It’s amazing, yeah,” Morissette said. “Anything that opens up and pulls us out of the locked binary is a loving act, I think.”
In the episode “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…,” Carrie is trying to wrap her mind around her latest love interest, Sean, being bisexual. She expresses many biphobic viewpoints, questioning if it exists at all and referring to it as a “layover to Gaytown.”
Later, Dawn (played by Morissette) and Carrie are playing a game of spin the bottle at a party. Dawn’s turn lands on Carrie, and the latter reassures her that it’s “ok.” After the kiss, Carrie says it’s “not bad” and “tastes like chicken.”
While the moment was relatively groundbreaking for the time period, fans were and continue to be highly critical of how HBO went about the storyline. Rather than treating bisexuality as a real sexual orientation, HBO portrayed it as confusion and indecision.
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