There will always be an ongoing discussion about what makes a good lesbian movie. Can a straight filmmaker direct a lesbian film? What types of stories should Hollywood be feeding back to a community eager to see itself on screen? Why are there so many historical lesbians—do we owe them to the flattering glow of an oil lamp or the opportunity to sidestep questions of any kind of diversity? Is there anything funnier than watching an interview of two presumably straight actresses discussing the soul-searchingly difficult but always enlightening work of filming a lesbian love scene? And why is there an assumption that all lesbian-themed films pre-Carol are actually terrible?
When I was consuming the highest volume of lesbian movies (somehow more than I do as a programmer and critic today), I wasn’t invested in any of these perpetually recycled, rarely concluded conversations. I didn’t know what critics, or anyone else for that matter, thought of the films I did my best to scrub from my browsing history. My essential questions in evaluating media—any media—were as follows:
- Are there lesbians?
- Do they kiss?
- Can they teach me how to kiss girls, too?
My salvation was found on YouTube. Through a simple search of “lesbians kissing,” I could circumvent both the money needed to rent movies and the DVD player in the living room needed to play whatever I might find at the library. Thanks to school and local library computers, and eventually my own laptop, I was able to leap from clip to clip in an online network of pirated films with kissing, loving, fucking verbs and women’s names in the titles. “Kissing Jessica Stein 1/10” would lead me to “Long Lesbian Movie Better Than Chocolate 2/15,” which would move to “Loving Annabelle Church Scene.” Suddenly, I had found what I assumed to be the definition of lesbianism: Kissing girls and getting in trouble—and sometimes, if you were very sneaky, getting away with it.
By many critical and popular standards, these are not good movies. They get half stars and disbelieving shakes of the head from (mostly male) reviewers, if they get any theatrical distribution or press attention at all. Falling just after the reign of the New Queer Cinema (roughly between 1999 and 2010), these undulating dram-rom-com flicks are earnest, single-minded and largely unoriginal, with a penchant for morally dubious plots and plausibly softcore aesthetics. I won’t argue with any of that. What I will argue is that a negative cast of this entire grouping of lesbian films leaves out a crucial piece of information: Hundreds of thousands of us watched them, piece by piece, in remarkably poor image quality, because they stoked something in us that we couldn’t find elsewhere.
To me, this boiled down to elements of danger, pleasure and electricity—the pushing of moral boundaries from the very premise of same-gender relationships. With such low expectations and a general mainstream discomfort of lesbian narratives that weren’t outright fatalistic tragedies or total fetishizations, these films weren’t expected to become the accoladed or best-attended movie events of the year. Instead, they created a sense of insatiable attraction, and were frankly buzzing with the joy of showcasing physical lesbian relationships; in fact, many melodramatic favorites are written or directed by queer women. From these movies, I learned that being a queer woman in an unfriendly world was about making terrible choices, and surviving. It was about loving furiously, when you can, where you can, and knowing that there would be more loves of your life. It was also about a lot of other things that definitely damaged my sense of who could be in a queer couple (white, femme, skinny, a frequent blonde/brunette ratio), but that’s not much different than the rest of the film industry.
The Golden Era of the bad lesbian movie may be over, but it’s not too late to appreciate the frenetic, gleefully misbehaving energy that made it so compelling in the first place. Below is a small selection of my most cherished, frequently watched clips of the lesbian media that taught me how to be queer.
Loving Annabelle (2006)
Lesson: Wear a nose ring, a ribbed tank top and write your crush a song.
Loving Annabelle is perhaps the most quintessential embodiment of what straight people fear about “predatory” lesbians. They’ll corrupt your monotheistic children into Buddhists, they’ll defile the image of the Virgin Mary as they pull from a bottle of Jack Daniels and regale each other with stories of sweet Sapphic lovemaking, and they’ll turn a beloved Catholic schoolteacher into a horny sinner who daydreams about getting fingered by her students in the chapel. This film is, quite frankly, the stuff of legends.
The plot is loosely based on the much stronger Mädchen in Uniform (1931), with Annabelle (Erin Kelly) as the rebellious senator’s daughter sent to Catholic school to straighten out and Simone (Diane Gaidry) as the bespectacled, closeted poetry teacher she single-mindedly seduces. Oh yes, there is glorious, orgasmic lesbian poetry at the heart of this complicated call to be true to oneself. Aside from the aforementioned church scene, there are many infamous clips that floated around the web to choose from, but I always returned to Annabelle composing a song of Sapphistry on her acoustic-electric guitar and dedicating an impromptu performance to Simone:
“All Over Me” would be a strong bat signal even without its connection to Alex and Sylvia Sichel’s 1997 riot grrrl coming of age masterpiece of the same name. Its performance predicates Annabelle and Simone’s frantic sex during a thunderstorm, and the remarkable feat of taking off a bra between two bodies so that nary a nipple is seen. The performance of songwriter Lindsay Harper’s moody, transparent ode to sexual intimacy was more than enough to teach a young queer to express themselves in pearlescent language only other dykes could understand.
