When the Yellowjackets Came Home: A Look Back at LGBTQ+ Life in 1998

Yellowjackets: The Final Season premieres November 20 on the Paramount+ Premium plan.What would we have been talking about when the Yellowjackets came home? A lot, and not just because gay people have always loved to yap no matter the decade. The dawn of 1998 was an exciting time for LGBTQ+ culture — including in New Jersey, where the fictional Wiskayok High School girls’ soccer team would have been reacclimating to polite society after 19 months spent in the wild. In December 1997, just a few weeks before our favorite fictional plane-crash survivors were preparing for the trip back home after their rescue, the Garden State officially allowed gay couples to adopt children, with The Advocate celebrating it as a decision that “opens the door for future generations of boys and girls to be part of loving, legal families.” In another timeline, we’re sure Taissa and Van would have benefited from that court ruling. (Look, we’re still not over it! I’ll stop crying when you do!) Simply put, there was a lot going on at the start of 1998: Ellen DeGeneres had just come out and Elton John’s sequins were shimmering in the spotlight anew after he rerecorded “Candles in the Wind” to pay tribute to Princess Di. The film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, released in 1997, introduced Savannah club staple The Lady Chablis to a national stage — one of the first movies of that scale to feature a transgender performer. And although The X-Files was decidedly in full swing when the Yellowjackets got access to their TV antennas again, Will and Grace hadn’t quite premiered yet — but that generation-defining sitcom would soon prove to be a phenomenon, overriding some viewers’ complaints that it was “too gay.” Is that supposed to be a bad thing? That was all happening amid a hinge point in LGBTQ+ history. First introduced in 1996, combination therapies were making life with HIV more livable, and for the first time people were talking about a