Rahawa Haile on the Alien Landscape of Gilmore Girls
The Nature Writer and Miamian Talks Pumpkins, WASP Culture, and Why Stars Hollow is Like the Final Frontier
Welcome to the third installment of the Gilmore Women Questionnaire, this time with Oakland-based writer Rahawa Haile. You may know Haile as the Black queer woman who thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2016, or the creator of Gilmore Blacks, a (sadly) now-defunct Tumblr documenting every Black character who appeared in the Netflix revival of the show, A Year in the Life, and the performative diversity they represented. You may not know that Haile fell in love with Gilmore Girls as a teenager in Miami, who thought Stars Hollow must have been some other universe — and fell off watching in season five, thanks in large part to the Life and Death Brigade shenanigans. And Logan. We love her, and we think you will, too.
Stay tuned as we roll out more of these questionnaires as we continue our journey into the final season of the show’s original run. As always, if you love what we do here and want access to these interviews and our archives, join us as a paid subscriber.
xoxo,
Maggie and Megan
Welcome to Gilmore Women: Two journalists discuss everything that’s wrong with every episode of Gilmore Girls & why we still love it.
MAGGIE: Okay. Rahawa, this is how we start all of these: Do you remember the first time that you saw Gilmore Girls and if you remember anything about it — where you were, how old you were?
RAHAWA HAILE: Okay, so first things first, I’m from Miami. Okay, like we just got to start there. I’m a young Miamian and I kind of don’t believe that pumpkins are real. Every pumpkin that I’ve seen is like a a McDonald’s plastic pumpkin, like trick-or-treat container. And there were a lot of pumpkins in whatever episode I happened to catch. But it was just like, it was one of these things. It’s snowing. And it’s autumnal in a way that does not make sense to me. If you would have told me it was on the moon, I would have believed you. And I feel like my world was so small back then, it was hard to imagine any kind of life outside of Florida. And of course, I watched a ton of TV and I watched movies. It wasn’t like, this is my first piece of media that I ever consumed. But it was just so frickin’ idyllic that I could not comprehend it. I can’t remember what episode it was. But I can tell you that there were pumpkins, and they were real. I was definitely in high school. I remember watching it at my mom’s place. And I’m like, I, too like weird cultural references to punk rock and books. It felt like a little show for nerds in an environment that made absolutely no sense to me as a Miamian.
MAGGIE: I love that. Where did it go from there? Were you into it? Was it something you just saw when it happened to be on?
RAHAWA: I was into it. I was very into it. I am embarrassed to say. I definitely watched weekly and definitely had a crush on Jess. And I was like, “Dean, you fucking suck.” And I think Jess was a big draw. I have two memories: I have one memory of sitting down to watch the premiere of the new Star Trek series, which has the worst opening song — it’s like a cover of Rod Stewart’s “Faith of the Heart,” I forget which one, this was in the 2000s — and like having a bowl of popcorn. And I have the same memory of doing that with like weekly Gilmore Girls and nothing else. There was no in-between. It was just like Star Trek or Gilmore Girls, which is a very strange binary to inhabit, to define my teen years by. And I think for similar reasons: Stars Hollow the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Rory.