It’s of little surprise to most sapphic movie buffs that Hollywood doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to positive lesbian representation. From the widespread trope of “bury your gays” to the equally widespread phenomenon of gay-baiting, it can be hard out there for a film loving dyke.
Hays Code
A lot of the problems with gay cinema started all the way back in 1934, with the adoption of the Hays Code. The Hays Code was a list of 36 rules that filmmakers had to follow in order to get their movies made. The rules included bans on things like excessive violence and depictions of sexual assault, but the list also prohibited the depiction of “sexual perversion.” Homosexual love, desire, and sex fell under the definition of “perversion” in the Hays Code.
The Hays code existed to please the more conservative and religious movie-goers of the ’30s. The more progressive views of 1920s Hollywood led conservatives to fight for government sanctioned censorship in film, bringing about the code, which lasted until 1968. Films of the 1920s, including a film with the first on-screen kiss between two men, Wings (1927), were more friendly in their depictions of LGBT folks.
Wings was an anomaly in its portrayal of homosexual love as something serious. Despite it being somewhat of a tragedy, the main characters of Wings expressed gay love in a sober way. The couple’s romance was treated with the same gravity as a straight one, unlike gay films that came before it.
However, with the adoption of the Hays Code, movies had to present homosexuality in a “morally upright” way: either eliminating explicit depictions altogether (which was more frequent) or by making gay characters tragic figures to show the “lonely and tragic” life of a homosexual if they were to “choose” the lifestyle.
The first on-screen kiss between two women was in a film from 1930, three years after Wings and four years before the adoption of the Hays Code. The film, Morocco, was not about lesbians but had a heterosexual woman in drag smooch another heterosexual woman for the attention and pleasure of a crowd of heterosexual men. This theme–women playing gay for the male gaze–characterizes lesbian cinema still to this day.
Of the ten top grossing LGBT movies of all time, there are only two that feature lesbian relationships: The Favorite (2018) and The Hours (2002). Both films have male directors, with Yorgos Lanthimos and Stephen Daldry directing respectively. According to Indiewire, only 13 films with a lesbian or bisexual woman lead have ever grossed more than $5 million in US dollars and, of those films, only three were directed by women.
Mainstream lesbian cinema is a bit of a boy’s club, which may explain why real life lesbians have a hard time seeing ourselves adequately represented on screen. In the boy’s club, catering to the male gaze takes priority.
The Male Gaze
While women can often suss out when the male gaze is being employed, it may be helpful to define what we mean when we use the term.
“Male gaze” is defined in Sarah Vanbuskirk’s psychology article on Very Well Mind, as “a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women.” The male gaze turns women into passive objects, used as props for the sexual fantasies of straight men. The male gaze’s portrayal of women rarely reflects the way women move about in the real world.
The male gaze is a patriarchal tool; it paints women as idealized objects that can only exist within the male brain by chopping them up into easily digestible parts. Through the male gaze, lesbians become props in the fetishistic, misogynistic, and homophobic fantasies of heterosexual men, which gets played out in the type of movies men make and the way they make them.
Popular media employs the male gaze in its representation of women, creating female characters who are flat, conventionally attractive, and frequently air-headed. They are hypersexual machines meant to cater to a man’s desire. When lesbian media is mainstream, it falls into the same trap.
Directors Make a Difference
Blue is the Warmest Color, a French film from 2013 directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to depicting lesbians as objects meant to titillate heterosexual men. While Blue was applauded among its mostly male fans as a powerful testament to the beauty and monstrosity of love, females (particularly lesbians) found it grating. It appeared to a lot of the film’s critics as little more than a vehicle through which to simulate lesbian porn and elevate it to art.
Jul Maroh, the author who wrote the graphic novel on which the film is based, while generally enjoying the adaptation, found the sex scenes troublesome. “It appears to me that this is what was missing on the set [of Blue]: lesbians,” Jul is quoted as saying in the New York Times. “This is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease.”
The problem with Blue is that it was directed by a male for a male audience, yet supposedly has something to say about the intricacies of lesbian love. Instead of fully actualizing its female characters, it capitalizes on the exotic (to its male viewers) eroticism of lesbian sexuality, utilizing the male gaze to deny its female characters agency.
On the the other hand, there is Desert Hearts (1985): the first wide-release movie to portray lesbians and lesbian relationships in a positive light. The director, Donna Deitch, is not only a woman, she is also a lesbian. The film was based on the novel Desert of the Heart (1964), written by another lesbian: Jane Rule.
While the lead actresses in Desert Hearts are not lesbian, every other aspect of the film is, including their characters. It even features the acting chops of one Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar in Star Trek: the Next Generation) who, with her short haircut and stereotypically masculine job (the chief security officer), represents her status as a lesbian icon to generations of Trekkie lesbians (myself included).
Blue and Hearts could not be more different films, despite touching on a similar subject matter. They both feature a sexual awakening in the protagonist, who explores a romantic relationship with a woman more experienced in lesbian romance. The camera work in Blue is the Warmest Color, more often than not, chops the main characters up into disembodied parts instead of forging them into fully formed people. True to the male gaze, Kechiche has a penchant for framing the protagonist’s ass in shots, making it front and center.
In Desert Hearts, the camera moves with the characters and the plot. It focuses on full bodied shots of the protagonists or moody close ups of their faces. Even the film’s sex scene doesn’t disembody the characters in the same way that the male gaze, evident in Blue, does. Instead, the scene does the opposite: the protagonists are present. Their entire bodies are locations where pleasure is enacted and sexuality explored.
Deitch refuses that Hearts be the locus for the male gaze. There is a scene near the end of the movie where the two leads are having dinner at a bar and one admits her love for the other. Just after, the waitress brings over drinks that she says a table of men bought for the two women. This moment of being perceived and desired by males is a catalyst for the women to retreat back to the safety of their hotel room. Like the film itself, the two women refuse to be put on display for the pleasure of men. Even the plot retreats from the male gaze.
Unlike with Morocco, and later with Blue, lesbian eroticism is not used to titillate men in Desert Hearts. The film fully actualizes the lesbian characters into themselves and into their love. The film reveals the difference between lesbian content made by lesbians for lesbians and lesbian content made by men for men, in its healthy representation of lesbianism.
Lesbians deserve the space to tell our own stories. We deserve to see ourselves on the big screen. We deserve to see our lives represented as our lives are, not the way men fantasize our lives to be. ‘Cause a film without lesbians is like a day without sunshine.
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