Period Dress does not Disguise the Enduring Curse of Lesbian Cinema
- slingshotmagazine
- Feb 7, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 11, 2019
by Susanna Joseph
Following their inclusion in the Barbican’s Modern Couples exhibition and a hotly anticipated biopic, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West are having a pop culture moment. But can we love and celebrate our gay icons without having their tragedy being the only representation to be found on screen?
Of all the infamous love affairs history has afforded us, perhaps none were so seismic as Virginia Woolf and Vita-Sackville-West. The two’s sexual relationship spanned only a few years, beginning in 1925, but the impact the affair had on both women’s craft was significant. Both writers forged art about the other, for each other; Vita’s son, Nigel Nicholson, once called Woolf’s 1927 novel Orlando “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
Queer audiences were delighted to hear that their romance would be coming alive on screen this year in Vita and Virginia. It promises to be literary and romantic and stimulating, as they were to each other. But unfortunately, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
Gay women can’t catch a break. Carol (2015) is oft-touted as a cinematic peak, and the relative scarcity of genuinely outstanding representation in film means that I can believe simultaneously that it was robbed at the Oscars and also that we can hope for better.
There is something about period dramas and LGBT characters. The allure of a forbidden romance trapped in antiquated rules and norms is irresistible to filmmakers. Enter Lizzie and Vita and Virginia, two films released this year that encapsulate the spirit of lesbian cinema in 2018: buzzword casting, costumes necessitating the undoing of 500 tiny buttons to remove, and an ending for the two women that will turn tragic.
Homosexual romance and relationships in the media are longing glances, epic letters, lingering touches. It can be utterly thrilling. All that chemistry, hesitation, reservation and wanting is lethal fodder. The biggest LGBT+ pictures of the last year (The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Call Me By Your Name, Disobedience) harnessed this in a way that did not feel exploitative, and have set a new precedent.
Still, there’s sadness, but the passion is unlike that of Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013); gone, hopefully, are the days of such blatant performative male-gaze lesbianism. The most tender, intimate moments of these later films occur in clothes, fetishised no longer.
It feels like gay people are starting to get the stories they want told. Vita and Virginia’s tale, two infamous, empowered women in a time that was far behind them, will be like blood in the water to LGBT+ audiences. Compelling, yes. But still so tortured.
Suspension of disbelief and a license to dramatise aside, the treatment of gay relationships in the mainstream media has serious effects, particularly on the impressionable young audiences who cling to any scrap of LGBT+ media as a lifeline.
In reality, they may not have any gay role models to look up to. They may have never met another lesbian in their life. And to instill the idea that same-sex relationships are all fraught exchanges and hopeless dead ends until one party settles down to straight marriage and children and the other commits suicide is contributing little to a conversation that still needs enriching.
There has never been a more promising time for LGBT+ cinema. There are thousands of amazing stories that need to be told, and plenty of diverse cast and crew ready to tell them. If we can’t find fulfilment in the past, maybe it’s time to look forward.
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