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Gossip Girl Writer Reveals Dan Humphrey Wasn't the Original Gossip Girl


Good morning, Upper East Siders! Gossip Girl here, and have we got a scoop for you. While it was revealed in the finale of the popular CW show that the one and only Dan Humphrey, AKA Lonely Boy, AKA a writer who somehow managed to get his work placed in both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair during the show despite never really actually writing, was the brains behind Gossip Girl. However, according to the show’s writer and executive producer Joshua Safran, Dan wasn’t the original choice for the titular character who chronicles the lives of Manhattan’s elite: it was Nate Archibald!

BuzzFeed reports that Safran stopped by the Vulture Festival to talk both the original show and the upcoming HBO reboot, and he spilled the beans about how Dan ended up as GG.

“I like to joke that Dan was Gossip Girl because I had left the show by then. Dan was not my intended Gossip Girl, so honestly, you’d have to ask someone else,” he said. “But I understand why Dan was Gossip Girl. I just had my heart set on Nate.” And apparently, before Nate, he thought Serena’s brother Eric van der Woodsen should have been Gossip Girl, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. (We, like Blair, thought it was Dorota.)

“We worked hard to kind of lay in tiny seeds about it being Eric, and then the NY Post wrote an article saying that Gossip Girl was Eric so we were like, ‘We gotta scratch that,'” Safran revealed. “Then one of the writers realized that Nate had never sent a tip in to Gossip Girl, which is true at least through the end of season five. Nate never sent in a tip in through all of those episodes, which is when we’re like, ‘Oh, well then he’s Gossip Girl.'” Imagine if Nate had been able to incorporate Gossip Girl into his newspaper, the Spectator!

Safran is returning for the GG reboot, and while we don’t know when the show will premiere, we do know that it’s set about 12-13 years after the finale, so in “real time,” and will feature high schoolers at Constance Billard Academy, Serena and Blair’s alma mater. The original cast won’t be in the new show (we think), save for Kristen Bell as narrator, and the cast will be more diverse than the ’00s version.

That’s about all we know so far, so until it hits our TV screens, we’ll be busy rewatching the original series for the hundredth time and imagining what life would have been like had sweet, golden boy Nate been unmasked as Gossip Girl. XOXO!

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Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Gossip Girl Reboot Will Star People of Color and Feature “Queer Content”



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Cyrus Grace Dunham: 'Pretending to Be a Girl For Much of My Life Made Hiding the Norm, Not the Exception'


For this year’s Women of the Year issue, we asked some inspiring figures—past honorees, athletes, and more—to reflect on their work. Next up is memoirist Cyrus Grace Dunham, who explores how we can name ourselves. Read on for Dunham in their own words, and head here to buy your tickets for our annual summit and awards ceremony in New York City on November 10 and 11.

Pretending to be a girl for much of my life made hiding the norm, not the exception. When people told me I had omitted information, obscured basic facts, left out details of my life, I would get this hot feeling all over me. I hadn’t been dishonest on purpose; I just didn’t know another way
to be. My performance of “girlhood” left me dissociated from myself and the world around me. The polite, articulate young woman everyone else encountered felt almost like a hologram; I had the sense I was hiding something monstrous, though I had no idea how to articulate what that monstrousness was.

My dissociation grew more extreme when, at the end of my teens, my sister [Lena Dunham] got famous. I watched her become a symbol that existed outside the physical body of the person I knew and loved. And her fame affected how I understood myself too. My old name, Grace,
appeared in the media in ways I didn’t consent to. This made me feel even more alienated from my name than when I saw it on IDs or in paperwork. I started to feel like my name was a separate entity, a distant abstraction. This experience helped me understand more deeply the ways I was already a symbol: a “woman” and a white person with a puritan-sounding first name, someone from a fairly prominent, class-privileged family, someone’s sister, someone’s daughter.

Maybe it seems contradictory, then, that I would choose to write a memoir and divulge so much about my life thus far. The hardest part, I found, was attempting to write about the loved ones who have shaped me. People become stories when we distill them into a few sentences, paragraphs, or pages, and I do have regrets about subjecting my lovers, friends, and family to this kind of simplification. I could write a whole book about every person I mention, and so many that I didn’t. Since I’ve been written about in ways I didn’t consent to, it was important to me that everyone in the book had a chance to read and respond to the ways I depicted them. Many of those conversations were extremely difficult. We remember certain events differently, and certain moments made us feel drastically different ways. But still, I’m glad the book holds evidence of these dialogues, which heavily informed the final draft.

I think, partially, I was comfortable turning myself into a character because I’ve always felt like one anyway. My own life has often felt like a video game or a movie to me, my consciousness projected into an awkward, gangly, white “female” avatar. One thing I know is that writing about myself as a character helped a more authentic me wrest away some of that person’s power. In doing so, I was able to shed certain symbols that no longer felt livable.

Cyrus Grace Dunham is the author of A Year Without a Name.



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My Life As a Cam Girl Taught Me About Pleasure, Consent, and Healing


For two years, my days looked something like this: sleep late, buy props, clean my room, get online, do my show, get naked. This was my life as a cam girl.

I had always been fascinated by sex work. I was sexual. I was seductive. I was the girl who took her clothes off at parties. I was the girl who wanted to be wanted. I was the girl who needed attention—sexual attention—all the time. It would have shocked anyone who knew me to know that I never actually got any pleasure from sex. It was the control I craved—the sex at the end felt obligatory. The truth was, in my teens and early twenties, I didn’t know how to experience pleasure. I liked everything around sex but I didn’t enjoy sex itself. It was difficult to reconcile—so for years, I didn’t.

Sex work seemed like an enticing and empowering idea—a way to be desired so much men would pay me for my company and worship my sexuality in a transaction where my pleasure was irrelevant. The perfect job.

Only one problem: I had no idea how or where to get started. Then I learned about sugar daddies— found one on a sugar daddy dating website. We had a lot of fun together, but ultimately, I wanted more from my career in sex work. One night, I was talking to him about the fact that I wanted to try being a stripper. “Have you heard of cam girls?” he asked. I hadn’t.

Being a cam girl meant many different things, I soon discovered. Many cam girls perform sex acts and erotic activities via webcams for money. Many also paint, sing, make art, build friendships and communities, emotionally support clients, and more. I fell in love with what I saw these performers doing, so I made a profile on an upscale subscription-based cam site, built a cam identity, and signed on. I was pumped.

The first site I worked on had a culture based on privates—where viewers paid by the minute for my time. During privates, viewers made specific requests of me, which I pressured myself to comply with, for fear of them ending the private show. I felt like I’d felt almost every time I’d had sex IRL—like I was just going along with what they wanted because I was pressured into it either by the other person, or by society, or by myself. In all of those situations, I told myself I had seduced them, egro I needed to have sex with them. Now, I was being paid—I owed the viewers.

This was not the empowering sex work I had pictured but I wasn’t ready to give up on camming yet. I wanted to feel more agency over my sexuality, so I joined a different cam site. This one was free and based on “tips” for various acts: Tip to set the music in my room. Tip to dim the lights. Tip to tell a joke or sing a song. Tip to show my breasts. Tip to have me touch them. Tip to bring out a sex toy. Tip to use it. I created the menu and set the prices.

Every night I performed for my webcam, putting on quirky shows, trying out an arsenal of sex toys, chatting with the viewers in my room, building a community of regulars. Within months, I became ranked among the top 100 cam girls on the site.

The author during her camgirl days.

Courtesy of Isa Mazzei

This is what I had been looking for. Camming was this structure where I not only set boundaries but I enforced them. Just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, I said who, I said when, I said how much. It gave me a sense of value of my body and more importantly, camming gave me control over that value in a way that was really powerful. It was a safe space to exist not only as a sex worker but as a sexual person.



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A ‘Gossip Girl’ Reboot Is Officially, Officially Happening


This is not a drill, people: A Gossip Girl reboot is officially happening.

Entertainment Weekly reports the streaming service HBO Max has ordered 10 episodes of a Gossip Girl revival, with the show’s original creative heads, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, on board as executive producers. Josh Safran, who was both a writer and producer on the OG Gossip Girl, will serve as the reboot’s showrunner.

According to EW, it’s not known at this point whether any of the show’s original cast members—including Blake Lively (Serena), Leighton Meester (Blair), and Chace Crawford (Nate)—are returning to the reboot, but most have expressed at least some interest in the idea.

“It sort of all depends,” Lively told Variety in 2017. “Would I do seven years of the show? No, because it’s hard work and I’ve got my babies, and I don’t want to be away from them that much. But I’ve just learned in life you never say never. I’m looking to do something that I haven’t done yet, not something that I did. But would I do that? Who knows—if it was good, if it made sense. We had so much fun shooting and living and working in New York City.”

Meanwhile, Meester told E! News in 2019, “No one’s ever asked me [about a reboot]. No one’s ever talked to me about it except for in interviews, and I always say the same. I never say never. So I don’t know. No one’s sent me that information, it’s coming from you.”

Penn Badgley (Dan) and Ed Westwick (Chuck) are the only actors who seem to not be so keen on the idea. “I suppose you should never say never,” Badgley told Variety in 2018. “I suppose there are conditions where I would. Do I think those conditions will ever exist? No. But they might.” And Westwick told the Radio Times in 2017 that the show is “played out” and “done.”

People on Twitter are, naturally, elated with this news:

Reboot details are sparse at this point, but of course we’ll keep you updated as they roll in.



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The ‘Gossip Girl’ Reboot: Everything We Know So Far


Could Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf be making a comeback? Some fans are crossing their fingers after news broke today (July 17) that an updated version of Gossip Girl is officially happening. Yes, the former CW show—based on the book series by Cecily von Ziegesar— is getting the reboot treatment by WarnerMedia’s soon-to-be-launched streaming service, HBO Max.

Rumors of a Gossip Girl return have been swirling since February. The exact details are still under wraps, but the log line reveals a few clues about what we can expect: “Eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The prestige series will address just how much social media—and the landscape of New York itself—has changed in the intervening years,” it reads.

Beyond that, here’s what we know so far about the series.

There will be 10 episodes. According to Deadline, HBO has ordered 10 hour-long episodes of the new version of the show. As the log line shows, it’ll tackle contemporary issues, including social media and online privacy, that have changed some of the dynamics in today’s high schools.

The original creators are behind the new version. Original program creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage are going to be executive producers. Joshua Safran, a writer and producer on the OG show, is also on board and in charge of writing the reboot.

There’s no word on the cast yet. While the show will focus on a new generation, fans are hopeful that the stars from the original series will make an appearance.

In past interviews, the cast has had lots of different opinions about a reboot. Chace Crawford (Nate) has signaled before that he wasn’t wild about new episodes with the original stars.

“I don’t think anyone’s been seriously talking about that. I think they’d have to come up with a real plan, and I know Josh and Stephanie would have to be a part of it,” he told Entertainment Tonight in February. “It is funny to me, it’s almost become a classic now. It probably goes to show you that we shouldn’t be redoing it. I can’t be in high school anymore. That’s the thing. I don’t even know what they would do. For me personally, I would love to see everybody again and I loved everybody and I would love to work with everybody, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily a reality.”



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Yes, You Should Absolutely Have a Hot Girl Summer


When it comes to summer, people seem to divide into two camps: those who dread the heat, hibernating until September, and those of us who are right. We live for the shortened hemlines, the debauchery, the sweaty nights out spent talking to strangers. We are consumers of pizza-shaped pool floats and Instagram-photo-shoot enthusiasts. Some small part of us believes it’ll be hot and humid forever. And we have lived according to the “hot girl summer” constitution, long before it was ever given a name.

For the uninitiated, “hot girl summer” is the phrase that will soon appear below every single Instagram thirst trap on your feed. The definition is a little ambiguous, but here’s how Jordyn Woods used it in a sentence.

The concept can be traced back to Megan Thee Stallion, the Houston artist who’s known for rapping about subjects once reserved for men—sex, money, and confidence. She opened one of her most popular songs, “Cash Shit,” with the lyrics “real hot girl shit,” and she’s been known as “thee hot girl” ever since, a title she’s earned over and over. Take the cover of her recent album, Fever. Stallion is decked out in full leopard and almost engulfed in flames, looking like a mix between Jessica Rabbit and the baddest bitch in the wild, wild West. The text reads like a warning, “She’s thee hot girl and she’s bringing thee heat.”

Fans soon took Stallion’s title and turned into a humid, sweat-soaked rallying cry, and the idea of the hot girl summer was born. But much like 2018’s big dick energy (better known as BDE), which started with a tweet about Pete Davidson’s, well, D and quickly turned into a cultural phenomenon much greater than the comedian’s nether regions, hot girl summer is about more than Stallion. Because hot girl summer isn’t just cute Internet slang. It’s a lifestyle.

But how to explain hot girl summer? For starters, it’s useful to compare it to the aforementioned BDE. Not because the two are similar, but because they’re polar opposites. BDE is all about the casual confidence of being well-endowed. Think: that not quite hot but somehow oddly appealing dude who lived on your freshman hall, had off-beat taste in music, and still pulled a shocking number of girls. You saw his cute smirk, his swagger, and you just knew. That’s nice, but there’s nothing subtle about hot girl summer. Hot girl summer is all about oozing your hottest, loudest, most extra life—without apologies.

As Stallion put it to The Root, “It’s about women and men being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up their friends, doing you. You definitely have to be a person who can be the life of the party and just a bad bitch.”





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