What We Owe to Dreaming
By: Sammie Downing
Tags: Coming Of Age, Queer, Film, Lesbian, Queer Media

Reshaping Lesbian Films

Ninety percent of what I thought to be true about the world I learned on a blue corduroy couch in my grandmother’s living room. Every winter we moved the couch closer to the fire and my mother, sister and I would huddle in the heated refuge and watch the only genre of movies I believed existed: romantic comedies. For most of my young life I thought a hundred years of cinematic history was comprised solely of The Sound of Music, When Harry met Sally, Notting Hill and South Pacific. We’d spend our sick days under heavy denim quilts watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.

My father gave my mom the 6-tape VHS set for her birthday, and it was one of her most treasured possessions. He could be a very tender man, my father. I still remember sitting next to him on the couch as he watched Mr. Darcy tell Elizabeth, I’ve been a selfish being all my life… Such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth. Comic, big tears pooled on his chubby cheeks: You’re choking me up, he said.

My father left my family when I was nine. We moved into my grandmother’s house and the rom-coms accelerated. The highlight of our week was Sunday evening when we were allowed a bottle of root beer and a movie. Even at nine years old it was not hard for me to see what my mother loved about these films. Two people from irreconcilable backgrounds and prejudices meet under unusual circumstances and are presented with the opportunity to change. And if they resist transformation? They lose the privilege of a future where the world turns out right. My mom was a single mother who allowed herself to dream in movies.

I still remember her pausing Jerry McGuire in outrage, standing before us in the disconcerting darkness, her face illuminated only by the fire in the fireplace and blue glow of the screen.

“No one completes you,” she said, pointing at us in her flannel pajamas. “You are a cake.”

We laughed and hoped she’d press play. “You are a cake and you are delicious. There is nothing you need. Nothing could make you taste any better.”

A cake. It’s not hard to see what I loved about those movies, those characters, magnetically drawn to each other, overcoming insecurities and past traumas, choosing, despite it all, to run through a sea of New Year’s party goers to tell their beloved, I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. They did what my parents couldn’t.

*

At fourteen years old, two significant things happened. I was accepted into an all-girls leadership camp in rural New York where I watched But I’m a Cheerleader for the first time, and a beautiful Norwegian girl, a year older than me, asked me to dance. She stood behind me, both her hands on my hips, and pulled me towards her while she whispered in my ear, be loose, be free. Something happened that had never happened in all my years of watching screen kisses. I felt a belly seizure: both internal fire and field of worms simultaneously.

I remember huddling around the TV in the camp living room with twenty other girls. The room was muggy and mosquito ridden. We sprawled across the floor and ratty couches in our bathing suits or sports bras. There were no men here. We could wear whatever we wanted. Our counselor pressed play. When the film’s main character Megan is sent off to True Directions, a camp designed to “rehabilitate” her by ridding Megan of her queerness, we all felt it — the room buzzed. Soon, Megan meets Graham, the only queer at True Directions who seemingly doesn’t want to be rehabilitated. When Graham, alluring and confident, crosses the distance between their two bodies to give Megan a tender and yet assertive kiss, I swear you could hear our brains click, like a train changing track — suddenly, there was another direction available to us. I spent the rest of that summer sleeping in a tent surrounded by young women from all over the world. We danced under the full moon and ran barefoot through the woods. I was fully awake to my queerness for the first time in my entire life. I felt powerful — a sexual magic flickered through me as I unraveled, bit by bit, the varied paths that were now seemingly open before me. When I returned home to Denver, Colorado, I started dating a boy and didn’t kiss a girl for thirteen years.

But I’m a Cheerleader is a fantastic work of cinema. Its wit, playfulness and camp critique the very real and damaging practice of reparative therapy. The movie is, in and of itself, a queer interrogation of a violent heteronormative practice, and through its satirical approach, the film manages to reclaim ownership and power over this narrative. But director Jamie Babbit’s genius and heart does not negate the fact that our two heroes exist in a world that denies their right to be heroes at all. I watched these two beautiful women tentatively kiss one another, afraid of what we’re all afraid of: relinquishing the boundary between one and the other and engaging in symbiotic vulnerability. They’re tender and shy. But they exist within a narrative that makes them choose between this new beginning and the love and understanding of their families. There is no winning in this story.

Recently my friend Daria organized a queer virtual watch-party of Happiest Season to celebrate her birthday, a film that would supposedly bring queer love to the holiday movie limelight. We were hoping for a movie such as The Family Stone or Love Actually (a film whose storyline about a lesbian principal and her terminally ill partner was removed) where characters wrangle with the very real problems of grief, familial obligations and the fear of rejection. Not ironically, Daria and I met at the summer camp in New York. We are both queer and yet, after leaving that green and sacred place, it took each of us over a decade to separately acknowledge and embrace our own queerness. She and her date were watching from New York City, while my girlfriend and I watched in Denver. We had all been waiting for the release of this movie for months. Daria and I shared memes and watched the trailer on repeat. We were excited to see Clea Duvall’s directorial debut. Duvall also played Graham from But I’m a Cheerleader. We hit play at the same time.

The film begins with a series of images depicting the year-long relationship between Abby, played by Kristen Stewart, and her partner, Harper, played by Mackenzie Davis. They’re seen exchanging necklaces, moving in together, playing games with their friends. It looks like a charmed and loving relationship. It’s Christmastime, and we soon learn that Abby hates Christmas, scarred by the death of her parents when she was a teenager. Harper is meanwhile planning her annual trip to her family home for the holidays, and invites Abby to come with her. The couple enters into the anxious yet charming phase that universally sets in upon meeting one’s partner’s parents. Ten minutes into the film, though, the real premise becomes clear: on the way to her family’s house, Harper admits to Abby that she has not told her parents that she is gay. What follows is an hour and a half of pure torture. Abby, introduced as Harper’s “orphan roommate”, is relegated to the closet (literally) while Harper publicly denies any romantic connection the couple might share. Abby is left to grapple alone with this sudden and confusing rejection, erased by the person she loves most. The familiar tropes of denial and isolation, on display yet again, are almost too painful to watch.

A collective shudder rippled through our group. It was abundantly clear that we were about to watch another movie where one protagonist is either ashamed of their lesbian identity or hiding their true self from their family. While But I’m a Cheerleader took on the isolation of the queer experience by structurally and thematically setting itself outside the rom-com genre with its camp and satire, Happiest Season, released twenty-one years later, does little to expand beyond mainstream constraints to make room for a love story that is more than a sheepish, begrudging acceptance of queer identity. In fact, the film failed altogether to center the experience of its queer characters in any meaningful way outside of fraught alienation.

“Here we go again,” Daria said.

*

Maria Tatar, who chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, wrote that the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, is “celebrated as the quintessential story of romantic love, demonstrating its power to transcend physical appearances. But…it is also a plot rich in opportunities for expressing a woman’s anxieties about marriage, and it may at one time have circulated as a story that steadied the fears of young women facing arranged marriages to older men.” The debate about the true meaning behind fairytales is long and burdened, but a great many folklorists believe that these stories were often used as allegories designed to teach children how to live. The goal of a fairy tale was to relieve the fear of leaving home, their first sexual experiences, and childbirth. Tatar says of Cinderella, “In this splitting of the mother into two polar opposites, psychologists have seen a mechanism for helping children work through the conflicts created as they begin to mature and separate from their primary caretakers.” Throughout human history it is through story and, more recently, fiction, that we learn how to live. We look to origin stories in order to understand our physical world — they tell us what will harm us and what will heal us. Our ability to provide a narrative for our human existence both validates our experience and also informs our future.

Growing up, my mother was the librarian at my elementary school. The school had just opened after being shuttered for over thirty years, and the library was filled with the dust of decades. She was a single mom and didn’t have the option for daycare, so every night as she perfected her little world, my sister and I spent hours hidden under tables reading every retelling of Cinderella, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Rumpelstiltskin that we could get our hands on. We had an entire universe open to us. As a child, I loved fairy tales for their beauty, for their inexplicable sadness, for women discovered and redeemed through their love. Every day I was able to enter the lawless domains these tales provided and feel like I belonged. Fairytales offered the escape I so desperately needed.

Notting Hill is not so unlike the fairytales I gorged myself on as a child. Watching it with my mother and sister in that familiar living room, we loved the scene when William Thacker and Anna Scott break into the secret garden and find the bench that reads, For June who loved this garden, from Joseph, who always sat beside her. Anna sits on the bench and says, Some people do spend their whole lives together. We watched this scene with a kind of hunger. There was a palpable want in our attention. All three of us wanted to fall in love and have someone always sit beside us. We wanted to go back in time, rewrite history, and have our father, here on the couch, watching with us. What I learned from romantic comedies is that when women are loved by men, a cycle is complete and what was broken is rendered whole again. More than anything I wanted to be whole and I thought to be whole, I needed to be loved. Until I was fourteen, I had never seen two women kiss on screen nor had I seen a movie where two women loved each other and lived happily ever after. Instead, I watched Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility on repeat. I began seeking that revelatory acceptance that would come when a man would walk through my door and say to me, I’ve come here with no expectations, only to profess, that my heart is, and always will be, yours.

*

On our second date, my girlfriend and I went to see Call me By Your Name, a film in which a teenage boy enters into a summer affair with his father’s older male graduate student and experiences his first deep feelings about love and sexuality. She immediately took my hand in the theater, curled into my body, making nothing of the armrest between us. It was monumental to see reflected on screen a version of love that felt familiar and beautiful and real. The question posed, to speak or to die, felt like the question in our new, careful relationship — will we put ourselves out there? Will we risk exposure in order to draw closer?

Stories of LGBTQIA love are out there, but, with the exception of Call Me by Your Name and the 2015 romantic drama Carol, they don’t often reach the mainstream. They’re frequently relegated into their own LGBTQIA category. A specific section separate from general romance or comedy designed to contain the weight and breadth of queer life is problematic — it reinforces the idea that this love belongs outside.

More often than not, my girlfriend and I find ourselves cuddled up together in bed watching as Cate Blanchet lights Rooney Mara’s cigarette in Carol, melting under their visible tension and Carter Burwell’s score that oozes longing and desire. We’re hungry for a love story in which two women struggle to overcome insecurities, fear of vulnerability or childhood trauma in order to draw closer. Instead, what we find is movie after movie depicting women who are afraid to own their queerness — or who are punished for their lesbian identity. Carol loses her daughter. The redemptive quality of these films is not the humanity of the protagonist, but her ability to accept her queerness. The antagonistic force is not the death of a parent, a divorce, or the fact that one of the characters is a movie star with a fear of intimacy — no, the antagonistic force is always the protagonist herself. Before there can be love, before there can even be a story, she must accept the fact that she is queer. The central question is: am I acceptable despite my queerness? It is never self-evident that these characters are loveable, whole and worthy regardless of their sexual identify or gender. Before we can even get to the queer equivalents of Notting Hill or When Harry met Sally, we have to muddle through entire films in which characters grapple uncomfortably with the question: is my queerness wrong? From Better than Chocolate to Imagine Me and You, Saving Face, or Kissing Jessica Stein, we watch our heroes wrestle with their identity before they can even begin. If it is through fiction and story that we dream of other worlds and new possibilities, what new frontiers do these films conjure for us?

*

Some may argue that fighting for a slice of the mainstream is contrary to queerness itself. In The Art of Queer Failure, Jack Halberstam writes, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world…For queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault…. What kinds of rewards can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhood to orderly and predictable adulthood.” Perhaps, in order to create the stories we need, we need to seek the freedom of the fringe.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a 2019 French historical romantic drama written and directed by Céline Sciamma, is a perfect example of a raw, consuming love story that unfolds between two women without centering on the sexual politics of their time. Marianne is hired to paint the portrait of a young woman, Heloise, for her future husband — if he likes her portrait, she will move to Milan and get married. From the beginning, the film forcefully reverses the male gaze and flips it on its head. We are in a world where male characters appear only twice, once at the beginning to ferry Marianne to Heloise, and once at the end, to take her away. But on the island, Marianne and Heloise are free to observe one another through the device that will ultimately separate them. The act of painting and art itself enables a greater understanding of their love and of themselves. It is because of this refreshing and liberating gaze that the ending comes with such a devastating force — Marianne is forced to look at her love, not through her own eyes, but through the eyes of men and society. After she leaves the island, Marianne sees Heloise twice more: once in a portrait of Heloise and her son and again when she catches a glimpse of her lover at a concert. The film ends with Marianne’s point of view as she sits in a crowd at a symphony and watches Heloise, on the other side of the concert hall, transformed under the emotional power of art. While this film does not have a happy ending, it elevates the discussion of intimacy by examining how art, memory and story shape our relationships with the world. Queer love is structured into the narrative, but despite how simple and easy a story of forbidden sexual desire in the 18th century would be to tell, it is not the obstacle that must be overcome. Instead, the film is about perception, the tension between what we see and how we choose to remember. Portrait of a Lady on Fire won many international film awards, but remains on the fringe of the American mainstream.

Portrait of A Lady on Fire is one of a very few films about the love between women that does not exist solely to discuss the impossibility of their queer love. Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman is another. The Watermelon Woman is an iconic film that never made it to the mainstream and yet interrogates our need for a queer archive, specifically a Black queer archive. The film follows Cheryl, played by Dunye, in her quest to make a documentary about a fictional actress, Fae Richards, a gay, Black woman working in the 1930’s, relegated to the role of a “mammy,” and erased from film history. Explored through the lens of a fictional plot is the real life need for both Black women and Black lesbians’ stories to be seen, heard, recorded and valued.

In An archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich writes, “The Watermelon Woman points to the vital role of archives within lesbian cultures as well as to their innovative and unusual forms of appearance. They demonstrate the profoundly effective power of a useful archive, especially an archive of sexuality and gay and lesbian life, which must preserve and produce not just knowledge but feeling. Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism — all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive.” Dunye captures the hunger for a Black queer archive while simultaneously illustrating that it is almost impossible to manifest within the conventional narrative. Towards the end of the film Fae’s lover tells Dunye, Please, Cheryl, make our history before we’re all dead and gone. But if you’re really in the family, you better understand that our family will always only have each other.

The Watermelon Woman and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are both transcendent queer movies that manage to free themselves from traditional queer film tropes. And yet, one could argue that their ability to challenge and reframe the narrative relates directly to their position on the outside. Perhaps Halberstam is right, being a queer artist on the fringe allows us to fail; and, in turn, define our own vision of success. But, as with every negotiation, we may gain freedom, but at what cost?

*

While it is important and vital to tell each other the stories of our lives, many people are still not empowered in their queer identity due to threats of violence or the potential loss of family and friends. These stories are real and we should honor them in our cultural narrative. But if mainstream film continues to perpetuate a narrative of loss and alienation, how does humanity grow its idea of what it means to love and be loved? How do we begin to build new spaces for ourselves if we don’t allow ourselves to dream?

Myths and fairytales evolve and morph over time; there’s a dialogue between what’s being lived and what’s being told. The Grimm Brothers completely reshaped the fairy tale canon through the many editions of their collection. While the brothers were always forthright about their changes, with each new edition Christian ideology and puritanical values were enhanced. Women’s voices were literally removed with each release. In an attempt to create more literary stories, the brothers took years of oral history and reshaped the narrative — one that has defined our culture for two-hundred years and we still reckon with today. The foundations of their work can be seen everywhere, from Disney princesses to Jerry McGuire.

Our stories and our lives inform each other. I could write a whole essay about how my idea of romantic love was completely informed by the 90’s rom-com and how my girlfriend and our therapist are still trying to undo the damage. I’m not asking for a lesbian Pretty Woman. I don’t want a scene where one queer rides the top of a limo to another’s apartment blasting Verdi with roses in their mouth. But I do hunger for new depictions of queer intimacy. I’m tired of watching someone struggle for 120 minutes to accept the fact that being queer is okay — I want to watch a movie where that is self-evident. In The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl said, And most importantly, what I understand is that I’m going to be the one who says, “I am a Black lesbian filmmaker who’s just beginning. But I’m gonna say a lot more.”

Like the Grimm Brothers, we, too, can define the future in which we will live through the stories we tell. By reclaiming our own narrative and our right to see our stories represented on the big screen, we can create a world in which a young girl sits on a blue corduroy couch with her family and watches two queers struggle to come to a deep understanding of themselves and each other, not in spite of their queerness, but regardless of their orientation. I don’t want a new dawn of lesbian rom-coms like The Happiest Season where heterosexual relationship tropes abound (one partner is an abuser and the other, generally the woman, struggles to accept the abuse and ultimately decides that love can conquer all). I don’t want more queer movies designed to make the statement see, we’re just like you! Being queer is a different experience and a singular way of being in the world. I don’t want to strip us of our stories. Erasure in order to “belong” is not the goal. The goal is for the cultural representations of queer life to be as rich and as varied as queer life itself.

*

On Sunday evenings, drinking our root beer, huddled on the blue corduroy couch watching rom-coms, my mom, my sister and I all sought something we desperately needed. We each saw a dream that filled a hole in us. In Jerry Mcguire, my mom saw a single mother who believed in a man and her belief changed him. My mom saw the future she wanted with my dad, a life in which love won. I learned to watch movies through my mom’s eyes. Yes, these films were about love — but to me, they were something more. When I watched Mr. Darcy declare his love for Elizabeth Bennet despite her “lack of connections” and dysfunctional family, I saw someone willing to look at a person’s trauma and love them anyway. In Sense and Sensibility, I saw that Elinor’s constant insistence on being good and strong prevented her from being vulnerable and that Marianne’s desire for romance and passion blinded her to real life. These movies made me feel seen; I saw myself in Elizabeth, trying to prove herself in a world of people who didn’t understand her. I saw myself in Elinor, protecting others happiness before her own and refusing to follow her own dreams until she broke. When I watch movies about two women falling in love, I often don’t see any of this — I don’t see any emotional struggle or human need beyond their inability to accept their own queerness. The only lesson I take away from these films is that if I declare my queerness to the world, I will lose the people I love most. There is nothing for me to learn from, nothing to help me grow. What I found in queer films made me fearful instead of brave, invisible instead of seen.

What I am interested in are for lesbian films that depict the love between women to also reflect the varied and unique experience of falling in love. I want to watch a movie that interrogates the love I share with my girlfriend — two children of divorced parents trying to reckon with that shattered history. What makes our love real is not the fact that we’re queer — it’s who we are — a musician and a writer attempting to craft our own stories despite a long history of abandonment in both our family trees. That’s the story I want to sit in a dark theater and watch. That’s the story I need.

Right now, the defining characteristic of queer films is that gay love is impossible. What if we rejected the queer category completely? What if all we had were movies filled with the sheer vulnerability of a girl, standing in front of another girl, asking her to love her. Suddenly all we’d have are stories of love — the messy, disturbing and beautiful task of reconciling differences in order to understand. The solution is not more queer stories, but simply more stories.

Together, as makers and consumers of culture, we have a responsibility to build a world in which it does not take decades for young queers to see themselves reflected in the romance portrayed on screen, but instead are presented with a vision of their love from the beginning and are allowed to interrogate that vision as art and story and form their own conclusions. We dream the world in which we will live.