Fund This: Queer Web Series Gives Us Tough Love

At 13 episodes, queer web series Tough Love has established itself as a thoroughly modern, snarky, and youthful look at today's LGBT scene. Following the exploits of sarcastic gay man Steven as he survives his boisterous lesbian roommate Blaire, the series aims to avoid the television trap of portraying gay characters as one-dimensional stereotypes, instead opting for a more varied and complex depiction that more accurately mimics reality.

"We wanted to take the familiar 'best friends in the city' premise and give it a twist," writes series creator and star Stephen Bell. "So we made them gay!" With 1 1/2 seasons, the series has explored topics ranging from weight loss to board games to straight people trying to turn their gay friends. Over that time, it has evolved from having a single crew member to over a dozen, which has served to increase production quality, but has also burned through the project's budget.

Taking to Kickstarter, the series creators are now asking fans and interested parties to donate in service of keeping the show alive. With an $18,000 goal, the team is looking to finish its second season with six more episodes, each coming in at a minimum budget of $2500. If the project reaches its goal, it will use $15,000 to pay for food, travel, props, crew, equipment, locations, editing, sound design, and color grading, with the remaining $3000 being used to pay Kickstarter and Amazon's cut and to deliver rewards to backers. "Producing high quality web content is difficult. The biggest challenge for us in the past was producing episodes with little to no budget," the team states. "With the proper budget in our hands, nothing can stop us."

Watch the Kickstarter appeal below:

Donate at the series' Kickstarter page.