Queer Books Across America: Incredible Lesbian and Queer Novels and Memoirs Set in Every State

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The 50 Best Lesbian, Queer, and Bisexual Movies of the Decade

I just want you all to feel seen.

It’s corny, it’s cliché, but it’s true. I want every lesbian, every queer woman, every non-binary person, I want us all to know that our stories matter, and that they’re being told, and that they’ve always been told, and that we deserve even more.

Whenever I’ve said to someone I was working on a Top 50 Lesbian+ Films of the Decade list I’ve been met with the same question: Were there really that many?

The answer: Yes, of course.

But there’s a follow-up question worth asking: If there were that many lesbian movies, why does it feel like there weren’t?

The fact is most of the films about us — and especially the films by us — do not get the attention they deserve. They don’t get the budgets they deserve, the awards they deserve, the acclaim they deserve. But that’s why we exist — that’s why Autostraddle exists — because while we may not be able to fund the trans lesbian action movie of your dreams, we can remind you of the rare queer films that joined the zeitgeist and we can bring your attention to all the others you may have missed.

The “short” list voted on by the entire Autostraddle team was 171 films. Voting took place in two parts: Everyone gave each film they’d personally seen a rating out of ten stars and then chose their top five favorites. The overall ratings were used to put together one list and the favorites were used to form another. Then those two lists were combined for what you see here. Films that had many people rate them were also weighted slightly higher on that list.

The intention of this algorithm was to prioritize films featuring underrepresented groups while still not discrediting popularity. I wanted this list to bring attention to our favorite underdiscussed movies, but also for it to act as a definitive reflection of the decade in lesbian+ cinema.

It’s worth noting how many of the films allowed us to actually tell our own stories. Here are a few stats for you:

+ 31/50 films feature out queer women or non-binary actors in major roles
+ 26/50 films were directed or co-directed by queer women or non-binary directors
+ 11/50 films were directed or co-directed by queer women or non-binary directors of color

There are four queer directors who each have two films on this list: Desiree Akhavan, Ruth Caudeli, Madeleine Olnek, and Dee Rees. There have always been queer women auteurs (*cough* Dorothy Arzner *cough*) but it’s exciting that there are now multiple filmmakers getting the access to build extensive filmographies of explicitly queer cinema.

These numbers highlight that nobody is better equipped to tell our stories than we are. Hopefully, the next decade brings less of a divide in regards to budget, genre, and awards — in this decade the higher the budget, the more likely the movie was directed by a cishet man. I also hope the next decade has more movies with queer characters who are POC, trans, and disabled.

Well, without further ado – here is the Autostraddle Best Lesbian+ Films of the Decade.

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50. Women Who Kill (dir. Ingrid Jungermann, 2016)

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As a fan of The Slope, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I found out Ingrid Jungermann’s debut feature was going to be a thriller. How would her comic slice-of-life sensibility fit within a heightened genre? Turns out – very, very well. Still as funny and sharply observant as her other work, Women Who Kill, captures the horror of trust issues. Sheila Vand is excellent at one moment being mysterious, alluring, and possibly murderous and the next moment just being a troubled woman trying to fall in love. Her contrast with Jungermann is really fun to watch, and, ultimately, rather heartbreaking. It works as a comedy, it works as a thriller, and it works as an emotional drama about a doomed queer romance. – Drew Gregory

49. The Summer of Sangaile (dir. Alante Kavaite, 2015)

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Alante Kavaite’s coming-of-age story about a queer teen obsessed with airplanes – and scared of heights – is deeply angsty and breathtakingly gorgeous. The lighting, the aerial photography, the costumes, the score, all make for a sensory experience that places you in the troubled mind of Sangaile. It’s a lovely tribute to the power of feeling truly seen, and an honest reflection on the limitations of love. Sangaile’s self-harm is handled with a fascinating balance of weight and levity. The film doesn’t minimize her mental illness or the severity of her actions, but it also never judges her. She’s a complicated person, right in the middle of the worst period of her life, and she’s trying. Julija Steponaityte and Aiste Dirziute are great as Sangaile and her new love, Auste. They have a chemistry that never quite clicks as we the audience understand their attraction and the limits of their teen summer romance. Sometimes love isn’t meant to last, but the few months we spend with a person changes who we are – who we can be – forever. – Drew Gregory

48. Wild Nights with Emily (dir. Madeleine Olnek, 2018)

Emily Dickinson’s queerness is really having a renaissance right now! But before Apple TV’s brilliant (and awesomely weird) TV series starring Hailee Steinfeld as the beloved poet wooing her brother’s girl with her poetry and wit, Molly Shannon starred in an even queerer and weirder adaptation of Dickinson’s life. Writer/director Madeleine Olnek’s brand of quirk is singular and she brings all of it to bear on Wild Nights With Emily, challenging not only the deliberate erasure of Dickinson’s gayness from the historical record, but also the idea that Dickinson was a dour, virginal spinster. In Olnek’s view, and in Shannon’s hands, Dickinson is no angsty recluse; she’s silly and compassionate and brilliant and warm and wise and full of life and wonder. Wild Nights is both ridiculous and completely resonant. Truth told just the way Dickinson liked it — at a slant. – Heather Hogan

47. Grandma (dir. Paul Weitz, 2015)

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I can’t really explain why I love Grandma as much as I do. Actually, that’s not true — I absolutely can, and I can do it in two words: Lily. Tomlin. If you’re a fan of the lesbian comedian, then you absolutely cannot miss what’s perhaps her finest role. In Grandma Lily Tomlin plays, well, a lesbian grandma (obvious, I know!) who abruptly puts everything on hold to help her granddaughter with a life-altering favor. It’s chopped full with Tomlin’s signature quirky warmth, but also there’s a seriousness underpinning her performance that you don’t always get to see in her other work. Did I mention it also has a guest starring role for Laverne Cox? If you ask me Cox’s comic timing is criminally under appreciated, and in Grandma it’s in fine form. – Carmen Phillips

46. Annihilation (dir. Alex Garland, 2018)

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Annihilation mutates several times over the course of its sci-fi-horror story, jumping around in times and tones but ultimately spinning an unsettling and gorgeously constructed narrative on identity and self-destruction. At its climax, the film delivers one of the most haunting, dialogue-free film sequences of the decade, one that lends itself to myriad interpretations. Its score is phenomenal, as are its performances, which ground the movie despite all the sci-fi weirdness unfolding throughout it. Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez bring specificity and stakes to what could easily be set-dressing characters, and the latter harnesses a major tonal shift halfway through the movie with a classic manic horror performance. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

45. Kiss Me (dir. Alexandra-Therese Keining, 2011)

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Kiss Me is the kind of lesbian movie we as a community tend to mock. A woman engaged to a man suddenly falls for a lesbian she’s tangentially related to? It’s become its own niche cliché. But the writing and performances in Kiss Me elevate it beyond its premise, or, rather, show why this premise is so attractive to filmmakers in the first place. There’s a truth to Mia’s confusion and Frida’s impatience. The situations that are usually used as plot hurdles instead deepen the characters. Who is this queer person so deep in the closet? Who is this other queer person falling for her? Should they even be together? This is a fun and sexy romance that doesn’t require you to turn off your brain – but might turn it on. – Drew Gregory

44. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (dir. Marielle Heller, 2018)

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More movies should be as subdued as Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a charming comedy about an incredibly un-charming, real-life protagonist played by Melissa McCarthy in one of the best, most severe roles of her career. The movie lets biographer Lee Israel be acerbic in the way only tortured male artists usually get to be, but it also acknowledges the consequences of her intimacy issues, especially when it comes to her ex-girlfriend (Anna Deavere Smith), new love interest (Dolly Wells), and friend/co-conspirator (Richard E. Grant). Can You Ever Forgive Me? touches on financial anxiety, sexism in publishing, and forgiveness in its sharp but subtle storytelling where the relationship dynamics do the heavy-lifting. It’s a heist movie that feels incredibly low-stakes, and that’s part of its charm. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

43. Atomic Blonde (dir. David Leitch, 2017)

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It’s no secret that the plot of Atomic Blonde is incredibly unhinged and, frankly, incoherent, but I’m a true believer in the fact that queer women should be visible in all film canons, and that includes shitty action movies that are nonetheless thrilling, stylish, sexy, and impecably choreographed. Hand-to-hand combat scenes don’t get much better than this, which makes sense given that its director is a stunt performer and coordinator. Atomic Blonde is a rare action movie that’s aware of its characters’ bodies not just in terms of them being capable and attractive but as being fallible, too: How often do we get to see bodies tire and bruise in action? The film falls prey to all sorts of tropes (including That One), but a queer love story that gets to be emotional and hot woven into a flashy world of spy thrills is still, unfortunately, remarkable. And yes, Charlize Theron’s many coats worn in the movie deserve accolades on their own. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

42. Hearts Beat Loud (dir. Brett Haley, 2018)

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So many coming of age stories about black girls, and about lesbians, so especially about black lesbians, are rooted in trauma. What left me positively enamored about Hearts Beat Loud is that it’s bursting with love, support, and joy. Queer actress Kiersey Clemons lights up the screen as Sam, who’s tackling her last summer before leaving for college and her first real girlfriend, Rose (played by yet another queer actress, Sasha Lane). Their love isn’t marked by parents kicking anyone out of the house, or painful coming out stories. They’re just two weird teenagers who love indie rock music and each other. It’s refreshing, and sweet, and in my mind — a perfect love story, wrapped inside an otherwise imperfect indie film. – Carmen Phillips

41. Summertime (dir. Catherine Corsini, 2015)

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The first time I saw this movie I thought I’d seen a masterpiece. And then I was like wait a minute calm down you’re just horny. Izïa Higelin is one of the hottest people to ever people and watching her fall under the spell of Cécile de France’s confident teacher/activist obviously made me feel things. But maybe that’s enough to qualify it as a great movie! Am I parody of myself that I love the movie about French lesbians bonding over feminism? Yes. But it’s not like the movie isn’t also good in addition to being the best thing ever. It’s gorgeously made and well-acted and does a wonderful job capturing a moment in time and and and – okay fine just let me be horny. – Drew Gregory

40. Dope (dir. Rick Famuyiwa, 2015)

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Dope is one of my all-time favorite movies, lesbian or otherwise. It’s one of the tightest scripts of the last decade. The teen heist comedy is unexpected and funny and surprisingly thrilling — which is a lot of compliments from me about a movie with a teenage boy as its protagonist! On top of all those delights, there’s  teenage Kiersey Clemons as Diggy, the protagonist’s lesbian best friend. Even at her young age in the film, you can tell she’s already a natural on screen. She steals the camera’s focus without even trying. Also, it’s worth mentioning, the black masc lesbian costume styling in this film? Top notch. – Carmen Phillips

39. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (dir. David Fincher, 2011)

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There have been other female action heroes — from Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown to Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman — but few have captivated audiences quite like Lisbeth Salander. Starting with Stieg Larsson’s opening salvo in the Millenium series to the Swedish film to the 2011 David Fincher adaptation, I’m hard pressed to recall another female action hero that’s generated that much fervor on her own.

Stepping into Lisbeth Salander’s boots is an unenviable task but Rooney Mara rises to meet the challenge. She is astounding as the pierced, bisexual, tattooed hacker recruited by disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) into investigating the Vanger family. Fincher’s decision to structure the film into five acts — rather than the usual three — requires Mara to carry more of the film’s load: balancing being the badass who fuels the movie’s action sequences and enigmatic enough to keep your attention during Dragon Tattoo‘s procedural parts. She earned every bit of that 2012 Oscar nomination. – Natalie

38. Eva + Candela (dir. Ruth Caudeli, 2018)

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There certainly is no shortage of lesbian romances where things don’t work out – internalized homophobia, externalized oppression, sickness, murder, suicide. But bless Ruth Caudeli’s debut feature for showing our heartbreak the way it usually occurs in all its messy emotions. Most queer women don’t break up because of queerness. Most breakup because God fucking damnit sustaining a relationship – years with another person! years! – is very, very difficult. Silvia Varón and Alejandra Lara are incredible as Eva and Candela as we watch them fall in love and out of love and back in love and out of love, trying so hard to make things work, because they love each other. Truly, they do. It’s a relatable and painful movie that celebrates love in all its impossibilities. And it’s a delightful announcement of a new queer filmmaker who has decades of great films ahead of her. – Drew Gregory

37. Bit (dir. Brad Michael Elmore, 2019)

If you’re not a trans lesbian, like I myself am so lucky to be, you may not fully be able to grasp the rarity of this low-key vampire movie. There are only two trans women leads on this list and the other one ends up with a man. While the decade has shown incredible progress for cis lesbians, trans lesbians are still more or less non-existent on our screens. And yet, there is Bit, where Nicole Maines joins a group of lesbian separatist vampires! It’s fun, it’s sexy, and it’s made with a casual touch never weighed down by the uniqueness of its representation. It’s not a perfect movie, but I treasure its existence, and I hope it gets a proper release soon. I’ve never seen my romantic life on a movie screen. Not fully. But there’s a scene in Bit that comes the closest; that doesn’t require me to ignore my transness or my gayness. The only difference between this movie’s meetcute and my own is usually when I kiss someone it doesn’t end with them sinking their teeth into my neck. Usually. – Drew Gregory

36. Hooters! (dir. Anna Margarita Albelo, 2010)

Part behind the scenes featurette, part treatise on the state of lesbian cinema, Anna Margarita Albelo’s making-of documentary about Cheryl Dunye’s The Owls is a remarkable work of art in its own right. With sharp interviews and cinema verité gold, Albelo captures a debate around how we present ourselves as a community. Generational divides abound in discussions of gender, sexuality, and filmmaking. Queer culture shifts so rapidly it’s a treat to have this document of a specific period of time.

After six years way from filmmaking, The Owls was a return for Dunye, an attempt to prove that independent lesbian cinema was still possible in a landscape increasingly focused on respectability. But it’s Albelo’s examination of the moment that proved this to be true. Her signature sense of humor and formal recklessness combined with insight from Dunye, Guinevere Turner, and a very young Rhys Ernst, make for the rare movie about movies that’s really about so much more. – Drew Gregory

35. Lyle (dir. Stewart Thorndike, 2014)

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It’s unnecessary to say that Stewart Thorndike’s fierce horror movie is more than its pitch – what if Rosemary’s Baby was gay? It’s unnecessary, because the film doesn’t settle in that premise and it doesn’t go beyond it. Instead it dives deep into the thematic mess that question raises. I’m still not sure what the film is saying, and I’m not sure it’s really saying anything. It’s just asking questions we don’t ask; expressing feelings often left unexpressed. And as an experience it’s an absolute ride. It’s a truly horrifying movie with a desperate central performance from Gaby Hoffman and an ominous supporting performance from Thorndike’s ex Ingrid Jungermann. Stewart Thorndike discussed wanting to make a trilogy of horror movies and I am very upset that she hasn’t been given the money to do so! Somebody give Stewart Thorndike some money! It’s been five years and I want more work from her! Are you, dear reader, a film financier?? If so, give Stewart Thorndike money right this minute! – Drew Gregory

34. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (dir. Madeleine Olnek, 2011)

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This bizarre and hilarious comedy is a tribute to lonely lesbians across the galaxy. Following the pursuits of three aliens sent to Earth to get their hearts broken so they’ll stop feeling so much, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is painfully relatable even amidst all its silliness. The movie shows that there’s someone out there for every misfit – you may just have to journey to a new planet to find them. Most of the genre films on this list are not made by queer women, so it’s a delight that Olnek leaned into her budgetary restraints showing all you really need for sci-fi is commitment. And this sure does have commitment! – Drew Gregory

33. In Between (dir. Maysaloun Hamoud, 2016)

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I love this movie with a specific passion even my excitable self rarely feels. There’s just something about its trio of stubborn women – Leila, Salma, and Nour – that feels so familiar to me, facets of my own personality, pieces of others I admire. It’s such a gift to spend time with these people watching them push against their oppression finding love and connection in partners, each other, themselves. The word feminism is thrown around a lot of in film criticism these days, but Hamoud’s film feels feminist in a pure and personal way I rarely see. This is a film about the occupation of Palestine, about patriarchy, about homophobia, and it is a film about surviving. That doesn’t mean simply living through the day – though sometimes that’s certainly all we can manage – but dancing and eating and fucking and loving. Tell the assholes to fuck off and look hot while doing it. Care for each other when it’s all too exhausting. I’m so grateful to Hamoud and the lead actresses – Mouna Hawa, Sana Jammelieh, and Shaden Kanboura – for making such a remarkable film that I’m certain will only grow in esteem in the decades to come. – Drew Gregory

32. Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

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Frenetic yet vulnerable, sexy yet haunting, Black Swan is a nightmarish ballet of mommy issues, power struggles, and polarities. It’s the classical ballet Swan Lake — on poppers. Nina (Natalie Portman) and Lily (Mila Kunis) diverge in their approach to the artform: Nina is too technical and rigid for the likes of choreographer Thomas (Vincent Cassel), while Lily is an unpredictable firecracker. When Thomas intentionally shatters boundaries between the professional and the personal, Nina unravels, unsure of what’s real and what isn’t. Use of the fantastic in the movie is just right — sparse enough to shock but a consistent thread in the movie’s visual storytelling. Some of its more horror-leaning images are the kind that stay with you for years. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

31. Thelma (dir. Joachim Trier, 2017)

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Thelma’s magic lives entirely in its camerawork and editing. Mesmerizing visuals make up for the wobbly plotting and provide a clear throughline. Thelma wraps an X-Men-like narrative in avant-garde horror dressings, and the result is quite lovely. Raised by oppressive, strictly Christian parents, Thelma’s first taste of kindness and acceptance comes from her fellow classmate Anja, whose affection sets off a sexual awakening for Thelma. Her burgeoning supernatural abilities reflect her trauma but also her strength, and there are touches of Carrie throughout the Norwegian-language film. It’s a slow-burn horror about desire and control, and it ends on a very dark, twisty note. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

30. Boy Meets Girl (dir. Eric Schaeffer, 2014)

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People ask me about dating as a trans woman with a grimace on their face. Their tone – or, on occasion, their words – suggest I might always be alone. This is absurd, of course. Trans women have been desired and loved since we’ve existed which is forever. But it’s true that there are minimal examples of this in media. Looking at the landscape of trans representation – especially in 2014 when Boy Meets Girl came out – one might think we can only be sexless or sex objects.

This is all to say – the saccharine romance of Boy Meets Girl is a fucking gift. I love the messy love quadrangle Ricky gets herself into and I love that it all gets wrapped up in a nice bow. I don’t even mind that she ends up with the boy! Well, I don’t mind it much at least. We still get a sex scene – A SEX SCENE – between Ricky and Francesca that’s sweet and silly and really, really hot. But beyond representation, the movie works as well as it does because Michelle Hendley is an incredible actor. She is a full-on movie star in appearance and charm and endless talent. Considering the number of cis queer women filmmakers who have made work this decade, it’s just a bit disappointing that the only trans women leads on this list were brought to us by two cis straight men. Cast a trans woman in your semi-autobiographical cliché lesbian romcom! I promise you a hungry and grateful audience. – Drew Gregory

29. Signature Move (dir. Jennifer Reeder, 2017)

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Zaynab, a 30-something Pakistani Muslim lesbian from Chicago who’s been living with and taking care of her recently widowed mother, finds herself falling quickly and unexpectedly in love with Alma — the Chicana bookshop owner whom she meets one night at a bar. Of course, Zaynab’s mother doesn’t even know she’s gay, and Alma has little interest in dating someone in the closet, so complications arise almost right away. There’s a lot about this movie that sounds predictable when you write it down, but on film it’s captivating. A lot of that has to do with not only the cultural authenticity and attention to detail, but also Zaynab’s personal obsession with Lucha-Style Mexican wrestling. I promise you’ve seen nothing like it. (Oh by the way, it was made by lesbian Pakistani filmmaker Fawzia Mirza, so when I say that authenticity and unexpected voice is at the core of this film, I absolutely really mean it.) – Carmen Phillips

28. Daddy Issues (dir. Amara Cash, 2018)

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There is an unlikely love triangle at the center of Amara Cash’s debut – a young artist, her influencer crush, and the influencer’s drug-addicted sugar daddy. But that’s only the beginning. This is a bonkers movie filled with bright colors, pop montages, and ever-heightening emotion. It also happens to be one of the most adorable movies on this list. That’s right, amidst all the insanity, and all the sex, is the story of a young woman trying to find herself amidst first love. Sweet doesn’t have to mean safe. Sweet doesn’t have to mean respectable. Straight people don’t get to determine how we tell our stories and it’s a pleasure to watch Cash’s declaration of this fact. A first kiss can be magical. But so can a first fingering. – Drew Gregory

27. A Date for Mad Mary (dir. Darren Thornton, 2016)

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If you combined all my adolescent crushes into two people it would be A Date for Mad Mary romantic leads Seána Kerslake and Tara Lee. But that’s not the only reason I love this Irish romantic dramedy. I love this movie for its heart and its humor and its totally fresh take on the in love with your straight best friend trope. Kerslake’s titular character has no idea she’s in love or that she’s even queer. She just thinks she’s frustrated with her soon-to-be-married friend Charlene for being so absent, especially when Mary just spent months in prison. The fact is Mary doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know why she’s so angry, why she keeps fucking up and hurting people, and why she can’t find a date to this wedding. It doesn’t all come back to her queerness – but a lot of it does.

Enter videographer/singer Jess. The chemistry is immediate and even if she’s not sure why, Mary just really likes being around her. Unfortunately, Mary keeps going back to Charlene. Mary’s growth throughout the movie is strained and troubled, but Kerslake finds nuance in every moment. Mary becomes an easy character to root for even if you aren’t painfully attracted to her – which, again, to clarify, I am. – Drew Gregory

26. Shakedown (dir. Leilah Weinraub, 2018)

Shakedown is a documentary exploring early-aughts Los Angeles via the lens of the underground black lesbian strip club from which the film gets it name. For a documentary, which is a genre most often associated with dry facts on screen, it’s also deceptively seductive — playing with the same pulls of fantasy that dancers are also selling to their customers. It’s so incredibly sexy and you can’t take your eyes off the line up of both femme and stud performers on stage (or their lives behind the scenes once the music stops playing.) – Carmen Phillips

25. Bessie (dir. Dee Rees, 2015)

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In 2002, Queen Latifah scored her first Oscar nomination for her turn as Matron “Mama” Morton in the film adaption of Chicago. For someone who had, until then, built a career primarily on sitcoms and an eponymous talk show, the Supporting Actress nod highlighted that Latifah was capable of so much more. In the years since few movies have given Latifah the opportunity to earn that critical acclaim but Bessie did. Latifah embodies blues legend, Bessie Smith, in some of the best work of her career…and for it, she earned an Emmy nomination (Best Actress in a TV Movie) and her first Emmy win (Best TV Movie).

Bessie is rare in its depiction of sexuality: showcasing both Bessie Smith’s bisexuality and polyamory and Ma Rainey’s (played by a scene stealing Mo’Nique) unapologetic lesbianism. – Natalie

24. Valencia (dir. various, 2013)

Billed as a “collaboration between a national community of queer filmmakers” this omnibus adaptation of Michelle Tea’s novel is one of the queerest, transest movies you’ll ever see. Produced by Clement Hil Goldberg and including directors such as Cheryl Dunye, Jill Soloway, and Silas Howard, this movie is the cinematic equivalent of a co-op. Every take on Tea’s work is so different, yet the sections complement each other so well. “Michelle” is played by a variety of cis women, a trans woman, a trans man, an animated character, and even Angelina Jolie in Gia but with Tea’s signature glasses superimposed. There’s a reckless freedom – a fluidity to gender and sexuality and art – that makes this a landmark work of queer cinema. — Drew Gregory

23. Disobedience (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2017)

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A quiet contemplation of faith, desire, and community, Disobedience looks at the disparate ways childhood lovers Esti (Rachel McAdams) and Ronit (Rachel Weisz) contend with the expectations forced on them in their Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Ronit left, and Esti stayed, and when a funeral brings Ronit home, she’s forced to face the ways she hurt those she left behind and grapple with why Esti remains. The reunion of two lovers sparks scintillating chemistry that is full of familiarity and a long history of emotions. Yes, the spitplay is hot, but the specific way it happens indicates that this is far from the first time it has happened, which makes it all the hotter. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

22. Circumstance (dir. Maryam Keshavarz, 2011)

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By the time I watched Nikohl Boosheri’s breakout role, I’d already fallen in love with her twice. First, in Meera Menon’s Farah Goes Bang where she plays a woman trying to lose her virginity on the John Kerry campaign trail, and then on the first season of The Bold Type where she plays the devastating Adena El-Amin who yanks Kat Edison out of the closet. There’s something about the easeful way Boosheri can alternate between seductive seriousness and goofy charm that is frankly cruel when paired with her physical beauty. Woah. Okay. I really must apologize to Maryam Keshavarz for getting too distracted by my horniness to give this legitimately masterful work of cinema its proper praise. But you know what? I don’t think she’d mind. Because one of the reasons Circumstance is so great is that even though it’s telling the harrowing story of homophobic oppression in contemporary Iran it never shies away from being sexy. The contrast Keshavarz is drawing between her characters’ private life and public life – the life they want versus the life they’re forced into – is emphasized by sex. It’s important we feel their intense want for each other, so it’s not merely theoretical when it’s taken away. Boosheri and her co-star Sarah Kazemy are so incredible and so beautiful and so electric together, it’s painful to watch them pulled apart. But more importantly does anyone know if Nikohl Boosheri is queer IRL and interested in dating a trans writer with curly hair and an encyclopedic knowledge of film? Asking for a friend. – Drew Gregory

21. Mosquita y Mari (dir. Aurora Guerrero, 2012)

Mosquita y Mari is such a sweet retelling of kind of the romantic friendships that any nerd who’s ever had intense feelings towards “the bad girl” at school that you couldn’t quite explain, but consumed you nonetheless, will instantly relate to. Two Chicana high schoolers, Mari (Venecia Troncoso) and Yolanda (Fenessa Pineda), form a bond that’s more than friendship, but also stretches beyond the vocabulary they have at the moment for girlfriends or queerness. What makes Mosquita y Mari stand out is not only how authentic it is to Latinx and Chicanx families and coming of age (though that is a big part of it) — but also how the film finds a way to explore a queer teen romance that’s slippery and ambiguous. Not all of us come out clearly or in a “straight” line, Mosquita y Mari captures that experience like few others can.– Carmen Phillips

20. Blockers (dir. Kay Cannon, 2018)

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Blockers is a prime example of a movie harmed by the initial reactions to its promos, which made it seem like a sex-negative comedy about parents attempting to make sure their teen girls never have sex, when in reality, the film is the ideological opposite of that. Yes, these parents are overbearing, but the movie is critical of that, creating complex, convincing arcs for each of the parents as well as the teens. Its coming-out story is cute and grounded, featuring a very sweet father-daughter scene, supportive friends, and nerdy romance. The whole cast is great down to the tertiary characters. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

19. A Simple Favor (dir. Paul Feig, 2018)

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I saw this movie late and was so sure it had been hyped up by my friends to be gayer than it actually was so I was absolutely delighted to learn that it’s actually quite gay and not just in a “Blake Lively in a tux reminded me what being gay is all about” way. It of course was extreme and campy and truly wild but it was kind of the perfect metaphor for that feeling you get when you’re first realizing you’re into girls but can’t tell if you want to be her or date her or both and your brain is in an action movie while your heart is in a romance and you forget which way is up. – Valerie Anne

18. Booksmart (dir. Olivia Wilde, 2019)

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Booksmart is the buddy comedy I never knew I always wanted. Two teenage girls who love each other and are weird and goofy and smart and who aren’t fighting over boys or an mis-overheard sentence or a rumor. It was fun and funny and emotional and gay in that real, awkward, funny way that gayness sometimes is. I don’t remember the last time a movie made me laugh that hard for that long, and it’s always refreshing to watch female friendships that are so obviously and refreshingly written by women. – Valerie Anne

17. Rafiki (dir. Wanuri Kahiu, 2018)

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In her 2017 TED talk, Rafiki‘s future director, Wanuri Kahiu, ushered in a new genre of African filmmaking called “AfroBubbleGum.” She had grown tired of African films that dealt with the war, poverty, devastation and AIDS; instead, she wanted to “curate, commission and create art that celebrates fun, fierce and frivolous Africa.” A year later, her film Rafiki — the incredible adventure of two Kenya girls in love, if you will — became the first Kenyan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival.

Even as the film grapples with Kenya’s homophobia, both on-screen and off, Rafiki fulfills Kahiu’s promise. AfroBubbleGum seeps out through the film’s use of bold color — watch the progression of pink! — and a vibrant soundtrack. But Rafiki‘s ultimate strength lies in its stars, Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva, who are magnetic as Kena and Ziki. – Natalie

16. Suicide Kale (dir. Carly Usdin, 2016)

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A dark comedy filmed in natural light, Suicide Kale is queer in its marrow, centered on two queer couples at different stages in their relationships and made by a team of queer creatives (Brittani Nichols penned the very funny, natural script, and Carly Usdin directs). It takes place over the course of just one home meal, but the suicide note its title references unearths relationship drama, tension, and complicated emotions that give way to a larger story about intimacy and trust. It feels special from start to finish. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

15. Princess Cyd (dir. Stephen Cone, 2017)

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The first time I watched Princess Cyd I watched it again a few hours later. My girlfriend at the time got home from work and I was bursting with a certain chaotic enthusiasm anyone who knows me knows too well. I insisted it would just be easier to show her than try and articulate why I’d fallen so deeply and completely in love with this movie. So we watched it! And she understood! How could she not? Because Princess Cyd is so, so good.

The mostly non-existent plot is Cyd decides to spend a summer with her novelist aunt Miranda. As she explores her casually pansexual desires – most significantly with hottie barista Katie – she also reflects on the memory of her mother and learns to respect Miranda’s less sexual approach to life. The experience of watching the movie is like being invited to one of Miranda’s living room readings. The experience of watching the movie is like being a part of one of Cyd’s trysts. The experience of watching the movie is like remembering the best summer of your life that you didn’t even realize was the best summer of your life until years later you think back on a small moment that shouldn’t mean much and realize it means everything. Every time I open Netflix I hover the cursor over Princess Cyd tempted to sink back into its world. After texting one friend about this movie for the millionth time she said: “I feel like instead of an eternal flame at your grave should just be a speaker of your voice wailing PRINCESS CYD IS SO GOOOOOD on repeat. Forever.” Add it to my will. – Drew Gregory

14. The Favourite (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018)

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After I saw The Favourite for the first time, I spent the next 24 hours asking myself what in the world I’d watched. I don’t just mean director Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreality and fishbowl lenses that have been discussed at length by straight critics everywhere for the last two years. I mean also, “Did I just witness both Rachel Wesiz and Emma Stone fingerbang the Queen of England?” (Yes, and not even, in my opinion, in their best ever gay roles.) The other thing that really sets this period piece apart is how damn messy all three of its leads are. Lady Churchhill, Abigail, and The Queen herself. But even their nastiest actions are clearly motivated by a desperation to survive in a world that would otherwise strip them of all agency and leave them powerless and penniless. Lanthimos resists the seemingly collective urge of all male writers and directors to justify any of of his female characters’ worst behavior, or to punish them for it. No one even gets assaulted. He showcases the full humanity of three entire queer women who fuck and fuck over each other, and aren’t sorry about it. It seems so simple, yet remains revolutionary. – Heather Hogan

13. Mommy is Coming (dir. Cheryl Dunye, 2012)

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Dubbed the most heterophobic movie of all time by, well, me — Cheryl Dunye’s most recent feature film is a farcical odyssey through contemporary Berlin. With an irreverent sense of humor and committed sense of place, Dunye’s film (co-written with Sarah Schulman) is a sexy and silly good time. It’s a celebration of queer sex in all its forms and a thrilling reminder of Dunye’s importance to queer cinema and cinema in general. It begins with a condom covered gun, ends with some accidental incest, and stops at a sex club along the way. Mommy is Coming is a declaration that queer cinema doesn’t have to assimilate. There’s still a need for work that’s bold and reckless and made just for us. – Drew Gregory

12. The Daughters of Fire (dir. Albertina Carri, 2018)

This exploration of the possibilities of pornography answers its own question. Can porn be truly feminist and truly queer? Yes, of course, and this movie is proof. Mostly plotless, this road movie through Argentina follows a lesbian couple as they add more and more queers to their traveling gang of lovers and friends. The cinematography is gorgeous. The narration is poetic. The sex is real and kinky and inclusive. It can be watched in a theatre as a work of art and it can be watched at home to get you off. It’s a treat to live in its utopic vision of queer community and pure desire. – Drew Gregory

11. Second Star on the Right (dir. Ruth Caudeli, 2019)

If Ruth Caudeli’s debut Eva + Candela (#38!) showed the promise of a great new filmmaker, her second film – a mere one year later – has the confidence of an artist fully formed. This story of an immature bisexual surrounded by rapidly maturing straight friends is bursting with formal experimentation. There is so much queer creativity in every frame illuminating Emilia’s inner life and various struggles. The black and white cinematography is subtly crafted and the moments of color are magnetic. Silvia Varón – Caudeli’s muse and, based on Instagram, IRL girlfriend – is so fucking good as Emilia. She’s hilarious and painful and always manages to keep us on her side. This is a messy movie in character and plot and style, but I say that as a compliment. Caudeli commits to the mess of her heroine and respects the messes we all sometimes make of our silly queer lives. – Drew Gregory

10. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (dir. Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

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Instead of simply filming Emily M. Danforth’s sprawling novel, Desiree Akhavan created a true adaptation – focusing on the second half, changing the ending, still capturing its essence. Like its source material, Akahavan’s film uses the story of a teen girl’s time at conversion therapy as a larger exploration of the way queer people are brainwashed to doubt our feelings. The headstrong Cameron – an incredibly dykey and just plain incredible performance from Chloë Grace Moretz – is a perfect protagonist as we watch her slowly start to lose a grasp on her reality. Aided by Ashley Connor’s cinematography and Julian Wass’ score, Akhavan’s film is a truly cinematic experience, never afraid to let a moment or an image sit. The sex scenes are long and specific, reminding an audience just how different it is to watch a queer woman coming-of-age movie made by an actual queer woman.

Also the movie is really funny! Is it a serious drama about queer self-hatred? Yes. Does it still have Akhavan’s biting sense of humor? Also, yes. It’s not maudlin. It shows how queer people, even in our lowest moments, find community and joy, make jokes about our oppressors, and keep on going to live another day. – Drew Gregory

9. Good Manners (dir. Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra, 2017)

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Horror-camp and relationship drama collide in this Brazilian movie that takes its sweet, sweet time building its world and mythology. But that character development and languidity is a welcome change of pace and stakes for what is ultimately a monster movie. Good Manners suffuses that genre with feelings as well as commentary on class, motherhood, and queerness. Isabél Zuaa’s quiet but memorable performance as Clara, a nanny for a rich and famous pregnant woman who she starts a relationship with, is the movie’s backbone, but Good Manners also manages to tackle a lot at once, including a coming-of-age story for its young boy Joel. It’s more complex than the average monster movie, but it also hits all the right notes of the genre with gore and frights. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

8. Certain Women (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

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Based on three short stories by Maile Meloy, my favorite of Kelly Reichardt’s many quiet American masterpieces is a tribute to stubborn women. The sections starring Michelle Williams and Laura Dern are heartbreaking and beautiful, but it’s the third section starring Kristen Stewart and newcomer Lily Gladstone that makes me want to scream or crawl within myself and implode. Gladstone plays Jamie, a ranch hand who stumbles upon the law class being taught by Stewart’s Beth. Despite having no interest in law, Jamie keeps returning to this twice a week class to spend time with Beth. It’s less a romance and more a crush. It’s a less a crush and more a window into possibility. Jamie is living an isolated life where she’s surrounded by more animals than people. And the people she does interact with are certainly not queer – and certainly not Kristen Stewart. Of the three women in this movie Jamie is the least outwardly confident. In fact, she’s rather timid. But there’s something about Beth that drives her out of herself and pushes her to take risks and it’s thrilling to witness. This is a melancholy film, but it’s also a celebration of our tiny triumphs, our attempts at something more. – Drew Gregory

7. Dirty Computer (dir. Janelle Monáe and others, 2018)

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Janelle Monáe has always integrated science-fiction into the stories she tells in her music — dating back to the release of Metropolis: The Chase Suite, released in 2007 — but with the release of Dirty Computer, she took things to a whole new level. With her “emotion picture,” Monáe created a visual compliment to her GRAMMY nominated album, that was a part Westworld, part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, part The Handmaid’s Tale and part THX 1138.

But the veneer between science fiction and reality has never felt thinner. In the world Jane 57821 roams and the one where Janelle Monáe lives as a queer black woman, there is a concerted efforts to erase the things that make us “dirty.” Dirty Computer is a call to resist the cleanse and to fight to be “free-ass motherfuckers.” – Natalie

6. Carol (dir. Todd Haynes, 2015)

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We’ve written more about Carol than any movie ever, and I’d venture to say that the internet at large has written more about Carol than any other lesbian movie ever — yet, somehow, I still cannot believe it exists. You can (and plenty of people do) disagree with me, of course, but I think it’s perfect. I think it’s a perfect film. Here’s a thing a lot of people don’t know: There’s a scene in the script in act one where Therese gives Richard a handjob. Director Todd Haynes did film it, but decided to cut it in editing — because he didn’t want the pleasure of a man to be the center of any experience Therese or Carol have in the movie. And that’s the real delight of the entire thing for me. Yes, it’s a brilliantly filmed and acted story about embracing who you are and the danger and ecstasy of giving into queer desire, but it’s also a story that relentlessly, mercilessly shoves men out of the frame. It invites the audience not to ignore them, but to laugh at them. At the end of the day, that’s why Carol didn’t win any Oscars. “Do you miss Richard?” Carol asks. Therese almost giggles. “…no. I haven’t thought about him all day.” – Heather Hogan

5. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (dir. Angela Robinson, 2017)

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This movie is one of the most stunning movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a celebration of women and breaking the mold and daring to love. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming and a true celebration of the love between three people in a casual and understanding way. I had heard that Professor Marston was in a polyamorous relationship with the women who inspired the comic but I’ll be honest, I thought the movie would maybe hint at it or mention it in passing; instead, it was the entire heart of the movie. It was dramatic and artistic and smart and also I learned things about science AND about Wonder Woman which really is my nerdy dream come true. I cannot recommend this unexpectedly unabashedly queer movie enough. – Valerie Anne

4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2019)

Before I came out, my lesbian viewing was restricted to films I could reasonably watch under the guise of cinephilia. It’s how you end up a scholar of queer film history before ever seeing an episode of The L Word. When Céline Sciamma’s debut film Water Lilies was released I wasn’t sure which category it fell into. The trailer was so completely gay – teenage girls kissing in between synchronized swim routines – but it was beautifully shot and in French so I convinced myself I could watch it. I was enthralled by its cinema. I was enthralled by its queerness.

Ten years later – my obsession growing with her next two films Tomboy and Girlhood – Sciamma created a film that once again stunned me as both a work of cinema and a work of queerness. There is no filmmaker around today with a greater grasp of cinematography than Céline Sciamma. While less flashy than some of the other greats, Sciamma always knows exactly where her camera should land – how the images can best bring out the truth of her characters. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about the creation of lesbian art and it is itself a remarkable work of lesbian art. There can be no arguments made against its cinematic importance and I hope some closeted cinephile in some far off suburb will lose her fucking mind watching Noémie Merlant spit water into Adèle Haenel’s mouth. – Drew Gregory

3. Appropriate Behavior (dir. Desiree Akhavan, 2014)

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Desiree Akhavan wrote, directed, and stars in this edgy hipster comedy, playing her own version of the Brutally Honest Misanthropic Anti-Pixie Daydream Girl. She vacillates from hyperbolic-but-relatable despair to Ilana Wexler-esque repellant charm. It’s quirky, funny, and delightfully indie, chock-full of the inside queer jokes she’d later employ so well in The Bisexual. Since the release of this film, Akhavan has emerged as one of the most compelling and original voices of her generation, committed to authentic, unsparing portraits of queer millennial life. – Riese Bernard

2. The Handmaiden (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016)

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Park Chan-wook’s erotic psychological-thriller-meets-heist-movie based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is a feat in measured but stylish storytelling. It’s violent and sexual, but those aspects of its narrative speak to larger themes and the immersive visual landscape of the tale so that there isn’t a moment of the movie that feels gratuitous. It shocks without that being all it’s trying to do. Because ultimately, these are very real characters ensconced in a very real love story. Revenge and romance are driving forces for the movie’s action, and several scenes teeter on the edge of desire and danger. – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

1. Pariah (dir. Dee Rees, 2011)

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Back in 2018, still basking in the glow of Moonlight‘s upset of La La Land for the Best Picture Oscar, famed lesbian author Jacqueline Woodson asked Lena Waithe if she thought we’d ever have a “lesbian Moonlight.” Waithe quickly points out that we’ve already had one: Dee Rees’ stunning coming-of-age and coming out drama, Pariah. But like its central character, Alike, Pariah found itself adrift in a world not yet ready for its honesty.

Adepero Oduye astounds as Alike, the 17-year-old who navigates her identity along a Brooklyn bus route: literally shifting from the conservative, feminine girl her mother loves to the masculine-of-center woman who loves other women, as she makes her way across town. Pariah is, at times, painful to watch — in the way that things that feel too true usually are — but optimism persists throughout. – Natalie

The 14 Most Heterophobic Movies of All Time

In our recent review of Amara Cash’s Daddy Issues (available now to rent!) we celebrated it as a properly queer, “heterophobic” movie. Multi-hyphenate feminist pornographer Paulita Pappel commented asking us for a top 100 heterophobic movies list and we thought that was a great idea. I’m certainly not one to pass up the opportunity to discuss the very queerest of queer cinema!

Alas this list is not 100 films deep due to the limits of my knowledge/the limits of film history, but here are 14 more films that proudly fit the title.

Rules:
1) Directed or co-directed by a queer person
2) Queer in form as well as content
3) Shows active disregard for cishet audiences
4) Lacks narrative and genre elements that might endear it to a cishet gaze
5) Focuses on queers who aren’t cis men (we’ll leave that list to another site)

14. Dirty Computer (Janelle Monáe, Andrew Donoho, Lacey Duke, Alan Ferguson, Chuck Lightning, Emma Westenberg)

“You would never call it the stuff of painful, soul-baring confessional.” – Alexis Petridis, The Guardian

Janelle Monáe’s “emotion picture” certainly has more mass appeal than a lot of the films on this list. The album it was released with was Grammy-nominated after all. But within its sci-fi music video charm lies an unbending sense of purpose. Janelle Monáe and her team created a film that is at once a sci-fi epic, a visual album, a public coming out, a celebration of queerness/blackness/femaleness, and an ode to everybody different. I also credit it for turning one of my close friends queer, because along with being an open hearted work of art it’s also extremely hot. It’s been a year since its release and I think we should still be talking about it. All the time. Forever.

13. The Young Marrieds (Shirley Wood)

“The final scene of The Young Marrieds might be its real money shot, when a Criswell-like narrator portentously intones some crazy-ass pseudo-philosophical bullshit over a shot of ocean waves crashing against huge jagged promontories (it’s art!).” – Adrian Mack, The Georgia Straight

You’ll have to sit through a lot of straight sex (some with questionable consent) to get to the reason this movie is on this list. But if you enjoy watching straight men get Tim-ed as much as I do then it’ll be worth it. This 1972 porn film directed by legendary trans filmmaker Shirley Wood is about a man desperate to get his “frigid” wife into being non-monogamous. Unfortunately, (or, in my opinion, very fortunately) he is met with a surprise. Spoiler alert: that surprise is gay!

12. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan)

“What a shame that this well-meaning look at the absurdity of gay conversion camps lacks the teeth to make its points stick.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Shoutout to Oscar-nominated cinematographer and noted lesbian Rachel Morrison for being on the Sundance jury last year and likely influencing The Miseducation of Cameron Post taking home the top prize. But even with this accolade the film was not immediately bought for distribution and upon its release was met with a rather muted response. The mainstream seemed to want trauma from its conversion therapy movie and instead Desiree Akhavan gave them two teenagers hooking up during Desert Hearts. The film cares less about the ins and outs of conversion therapy and more about the ways cishet society causes us all to question our truth. Cameron’s self-doubt and self-hatred is relatable to most queer people whether we’ve experienced brainwashing of this nature or not. It may not have been a runaway hit at the box office or on the awards circuit, but Akhavan’s film is sure to be celebrated by generations of queers to come.

11. Valencia (Clement Hil Goldberg, Peter Anthony, Sharon Barnes, Aubree Bernier-Clarke, Cary Cronenwett, Bug Davidson, Cheryl Dunye, Lares Feliciano, Dia Felix, Silas Howard, Alexa Inkeles, Jerry Lee, Olivia Parriott, Jill Soloway, Samuel Topiary, Courtney Trouble, Michelle Lawler, Sara St. Martin Lynne, Chris Vargas, Greg Youmans)

The whole piece never coheres into something meaningful.” – Dan Schindel, Movie Mezzanine

Is there anything queerer than a Michelle Tea adaptation directed by twenty people? Not much! Especially not when those twenty people approach the material with an immense amount of fluidity in casting and in form. It’s basically a requirement when discussing an omnibus film to warn that some sections are better than others, but in this case I think it’s just a matter of personal preference. You may be more drawn to one style over another, but no chapter feels like an obvious weak link. My personal favorite may be the collection of altered and dubbed Angelina Jolie movies. (Gia waking up next to a pile of tarot cards is peak for queers by queers.) This movie also includes the line “Later I got lonely and started throwing zine parties.” So… yeah.

10. D.E.B.S. (Angela Robinson)

“Only the world of X-rated movies overlooks such flimsiness of plot, absence of acting talent, cheap special effects, banal dialogue and scantily clad young women.” – Susan Walker, Toronto Star

Rachel’s “10 Thoughts on Classic Lesbian Movie D.E.B.S. After Seeing It for the First Time Yesterday” and all of the comments below may have been when I truly fell in love with Autostraddle.com. So many people shared how D.E.B.S. made their baby gay lives a little brighter and it really pointed to how something fun can truly be meaningful. Angela Robinson really gave us a gift with this one. A decade and a half later lesbian-action-romance is still not a genre we see a lot (or ever), but we’ll always have D.E.B.S. And it’s amazing.

9. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (Madeleine Olnek)

“Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes” – Jaime N. Christley, Slant Magazine

This movie about aliens sent to Earth because they have too many feelings is not relatable at all. Not when they actively make poor romantic choices or go to the Cubby Hole or start vlogging or fall in love with their best friends. Definitely nothing to relate to whatsoever! Okay that’s obviously a lie and if at some point during this movie you don’t shout, “Oh God I’m such a Zylar!” then you’re lying too (alternate options: Barr, Zoinx). This movie’s many delights come from how honest and specific its lesbian love stories remain despite the added element of socially awkward aliens. After all, aren’t we all socially awkward aliens?

8. Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pedro Almodóvar)

“Pedro Almodovar showed not a whisker of promise in his amateurish directorial debut, a smutty sexual sideshow most safely viewed in a full body condom.” – Rita Kempley, Washington Post

This movie is certainly not for straight people. But honestly it’s not for some queer people either. And that’s okay! Throughout his career Pedro Almodóvar has been accused of misogyny by some and celebrated for his focus on women by others. Personally I find it fascinating to watch Almodóvar grapple with self-hatred around his own shamed femininity. His debut film might be his most offensive, but it’s also his most irreverently queer. After Pepi is raped by a police officer, she recruits her lesbian friend to turn the officer’s repressed wife gay. A rape/revenge film with a queer twist, Almodóvar never settles for easy answers. Within the madcap tone, there’s a brutal and melancholy truth to how the story turns. But above all else it is a comedy. A comedy where a lesbian punk singer urinates on a policeman’s wife!

7. All Over Me (Alex Sichel)

“Less successful at portraying indecision than it is at inducing boredom.” – John Hartl, Film.com

A film doesn’t have to be campy to be formally queer. Alex Sichel was given a grant by the Princess Grace Foundation to make a movie about the riot grrrl music scene and instead she made a riot grrrl movie. Even the cinematography and sound design feel dykey. (I don’t know what that means exactly but it’s true!) The soundtrack does not disappoint, of course, and this movie has both a painful “in love with my straight(?) friend” storyline and a “first love with a dyke in a band” storyline. And the dyke in the band is played by Leisha Hailey with pink hair. I know! This movie actually got pretty good reviews by straight critics, but positive reviews don’t cut it. This deserves continued accolades and at the very least a streaming release. It’s so sweet and sad and angsty and GAY. I believe Alex Sichel made this movie for queer people. I also believe she made it for me, personally, which was super nice of her.

6. Women in Revolt (Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling)

“A madcap soap opera whose three manic heroines are played by female impersonators—which may be interpreted as the ultimate put-down of women’s lib.” – Vincent Canby, New York Times

Paul Morrisey and Andy Warhol cast Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling in this movie as a “fuck you” to the feminist movement. What better parody of women than these gay men who every day make a mockery of women? Except, of course, they weren’t gay men mocking women but rather a genderqueer person and two trans women being themselves. So this film, intended to simply lampoon the women’s movement, instead becomes a hilarious, outrageous, and brutal portrayal of how trans feminine people face discrimination as women/women-adjacent and as trans people. The feminist movement is certainly mocked, but not in relation to men. It’s mocked in relation to the trans women and non-binary people who are regularly excluded. The three actors really do steal the movie from Morrisey and Warhol and it’s an absolute pleasure to watch. It’s rare to see a movie explicitly made for queer people, but it’s even rarer to see a movie explicitly made for trans people, especially from 1971. And despite the best efforts of its director and producer that’s what this movie became.

5. The filmography of Barbara Hammer (Barbara Hammer)

Barbara Hammer was virtually ignored by the art world from 1968 to 1985. The absence of a review is a type of review.

When I was first brainstorming for this list I jotted down “pick a Barbara Hammer film.” But when I read that note again my brain yelled, “I won’t do it!” so I’m not going to do it. Hammer’s entire filmography is that of an artist, a queer artist, with no concern for reception. The way she shoots sex and bodies is so far removed from a male gaze I chuckle imagining a straight dude trying to get off on one of her films. Whether discussing sex or breast cancer or political responsibility, Hammer and her work remain a guide to being an unforgiving queer artist. I’m unsure whether this is due to her wishes or a lack of interest, but none of her work is available online and if she would’ve been okay with it I hope that changes soon. (And, okay, if I was forced to pick favorites I’d go with Psychosynthesis, The History of the World According to a Lesbian, and, of course, Dyketactics.) (Also I’m still thinking about Whitney Pow’s essay on Hammer and you should really read it!)

4. MURDER and Murder (Yvonne Rainer)

“It’s not that these smart, complicated women are unlikable. It’s that their private little soap opera is not especially charismatic.” – Stephen Holden, New York Times

Any movie that begins with a 60-something lesbian saying to her straight friend, “I love eating pussy” is an automatic masterpiece in my book. And the rest of the film really lives up to that opening. A celebration of the day to day and ups and downs of a partnership, Rainer’s last feature follows Doris and Mildred as they navigate their relationship. They are accompanied by a Greek chorus of Doris’ mother, Mildred’s younger self, and Yvonne Rainer the filmmaker. It’s a complex, experimental, and ever so sweet film. The movie more or less takes the stance that all women can be and should be lesbians and that’s something I can certainly get behind. Also Congressperson Pete Hoekstra used it as an excuse to cut funding from the NEA which is unfortunately always a good sign.

3. But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit)

“I would have preferred to know more in documentary terms about the actual reality of these terrible camps, rather than sit through this heavy-handed and oddly lenient comedy.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

What else is there to say about Jamie Babbit’s debut? Except maybe to remind you all that when this came out critics fucking hated it. Among my friends, But I’m a Cheerleader is a universally accepted masterpiece so it’s easy to forget how it was initially received. Like with Cameron Post, critics seemed offended that Babbit would approach the topic of conversion therapy with a sense of humor. But for queer people, who are plenty well-versed in reality thank you very much, this very funny and very sweet movie is an absolute gem. The best of the straights, Natasha Lyonne, is great as ever and the supporting cast which includes Clea Duvall, Michelle Williams, and RuPaul is great as well. Certainly accepted now as a cult classic I think it’s time we acknowledge it simply as a classic classic.

2. Multiple Maniacs (John Waters)

“Humor he has. It’s just a shame he has chosen to ignore that for the brutality which is not, as he and his audiences may think, a gas.” – Lou Cedrone, The Baltimore Sun

John Waters’ second feature and first “talkie” begins with a career thesis statement. Cishet suburban normals are led through “The Cavalcade of Perversion,” a free exhibit of fetishes and shocks that includes a puke eater and ends with Divine robbing the patrons at gun point. This scene couldn’t be clearer in saying “fuck you” to a mainstream audience. The rest of the film continues at this level of mayhem including my favorite scene and one of my very favorite sex scenes of all time. Genderqueer lesbian sex scenes are few and far between and only this one features a rosary used as anal beads. Not for cishet eyes that is for certain!

1. Mommy is Coming (Cheryl Dunye)

On Rotten Tomatoes, Cheryl Dunye’s most recent feature has a grand total of 0 reviews.

When I started compiling this list I immediately knew this would be #1. Cheryl Dunye has always been a filmmaker aware of her place in the film world. Her breakout hit (and my personal favorite movie of all time), The Watermelon Woman, directly engages with film history and much of her work features fourth-wall-breaking interludes that emphasize the actual making of the movies. Dunye is an artist who thinks about who she is creating for and how it will be received. And she’s definitely creating for queers.

Written with Sarah Schulman, Mommy is Coming is a taboo farce about a couple (played by Lil Harlow and Papi Coxxx) who go on separate sexual adventures through Berlin. It’s a celebration of queer sex in all its forms and a declaration of purpose within queer cinema. It feels a bit silly to get serious about a film so fun, but movies like this and like a lot of the films on this list are deeply important. A lot of queer acceptance has been conditional. We’re allowed to be queer as long as we don’t talk about it or as long as we don’t show it or as long as we act like everyone else. As a queer person, it’s a relief to watch work like this. It gives us permission to just be free, to just be queer, to just be ourselves. That’s what great queer cinema can accomplish.

What’d I miss? Let us know your favorite heterophobic movies in the comments!

The 15 Best Lesbian and Bisexual Movies of 2018

2018 was a stunning year for lesbian and bisexual women in film. First, just the sheer number of films that were available to us. This is the first time we’ve ever even been able to assemble a year-end list of best films. We might have been able to cobble together a short one last year, but there were enough movies this year that we had to leave some off. And this list doesn’t even include the very queer but somehow not exactly canonical gay favorites like Ocean’s 8 and Incredibles 2. Second, the production value of these films. Lesbian and bisexual movies have always been notoriously underfunded and it shows in areas as small as sound design and as big as acting. The caliber of talent that was drawn to making lesbian and bisexual movies this year is frankly unbelievable.

Finally — and in my opinion most remarkable — is the fact that none of the movies on this list trip over the same sad tropes that have been plaguing our film canon forever. There are some heartbreakers in here, but not in a cliched way. No one’s getting a bullet in the eyeball that lands in their brain as punishment for enjoying a single sexual encounter with another woman. In fact most of the movies on this list have hopeful, happy endings. I don’t need to tell you what a balm that was this year.

Below are the 15 best lesbian and bisexual films of 2018. (To be included on this list, these films had to be available in theaters or readily streamable in the United States.)

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15. Lez Bomb

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“Families are messy and complicated, and holidays are messy and complicated, and there are dozens of movies about women taking home their boyfriends (and men taking home their girlfriends) for the first time on Thanksgiving or Christmas — and all the messy, complicated hijinks that ensue. Lez Bomb, by writer/director Jenna Laurenzo, is the first feature film to take that age-old formula and put a queer woman at the center of it.” — Heather Hogan

14. Bad Reputation

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“Jett’s sexuality isn’t relegated to its own very special narrative segment, and that’s because it’s everywhere — as it should be for a rock star, and as it should be for all of us. Jett’s brand of queer is as much about Elvis being a pretty boy with swishy hips as it is Miley Cyrus famously trying to bed her, Kristen Stewart portraying her, lyrics that suggest anything but cisheteronormativity. Jett’s anti-war, pro-animal, pro-woman politics follow suit, less a label than they are actions: performing for troops in the Middle East and Bosnia, openly calling for an end to the seal slaughter while continuing to wear her decades-old leather, and fundraising women’s self-defense classes after the singer Mia Zapata’s horrifying murder. Bad Reputation reminds us that people with a knack for keeping their cool during trying times aren’t apathetic. Sometimes, they’re exactly what we, and our headphones, need.” — Sarah Fonseca

13. Annihilation

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“Gina Rodriguez steals the show with a standout performance. And no I don’t just say that because she plays a confident and muscly soft butch lesbian with an undercut who opens a beer bottle in that way where you slam it against a table edge with your hand (something I have never been able to accomplish without hurting myself). But yes, those details are also important! She’s funny, delivering some of the movie’s rare but needed bursts of comedic relief. But she also encompasses the emotional complexity of what it really means to enter the shimmer. She starts with a lot of swagger that, like the shimmer itself, suddenly and disorientingly becomes something much more insidious. Rodriguez flips that switch in a wholly convincing way. Her character’s confusion and paranoia instantly pulls you right into that dark, uncertain place.” — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

12. The Feels

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“The thing that surprised me the most about The Feels is how relatable it was. I’ve never had Andi and Lu’s specific relationship drama, but I’ve been in that cabin with that friend group more times than I care to count. Surrounded by people you love who also drive you bananas, the family members you constantly judge but need by your side, the lesbians you learn to like just because they’re lesbians, those lesbians lesbianing in the lesbianest ways, and that one dude everyone wants to throw into the river. It’s authentic and it’s tender and while the climax is a little bit rushed — eh hem — it’s a gay happy ending. And that, itself, is still revolutionary.” — Heather Hogan

11. Lizzie

“Lizzie is brutal, historically attuned, and committed to exploring effeminate trauma and retaliation. As you might remember, Lifetime took a shot at a telling this story in four years ago with Christina Ricci in the lead role. While I enjoyed Lizzie Borden Took an Axe’s anachronistic blues rock soundtrack and Clea Duvall’s sour-faced Emma, it’s pretty impossible for a television network to craft a period slasher movie when its most risqué rating is a PG-14. Macneill also refrains from watering Lizzie into a mischievous bombshell. Grappling with health issues, reading books aloud to her pets, and living under her father’s thumb, she’s anything but cool. Perhaps this is what makes this movie so alluring: there’s a little of Lizzie in all of us.” — Sarah Fonseca

10. Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart: Lorraine Hansberry

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“Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, fourteen years in the making, is a great example of a work that thoughtfully and creatively layers ideas about gender and sexuality alongside race. In addition to readings from Lorraine’s private journals, the film features a ton of esteemed folks familiar with her, from feminist scholars and theater critics to legendary actors like Sidney Poitier and subversive writers like Ann Bannon; some of whom weren’t afraid to spar with one another’s ideas or Hansberry’s work on-camera. Like Lorraine’s second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart fearlessly and gracefully tackles the mix of identities—femininity and queerness among them—that Peck found too overwhelming.” — Sarah Fonseca

9. A Simple Favor

“A Simple Favor gets off on blending and blurring genres. Not quite an all-out dark thriller in the vain of Gone Girl, it does borrow from that genre but, even more accurately, from Lifetime movies. Incest, revenge arson, frame jobs, affairs, and secret siblings all make appearances in this tableau of fuckery. It’s a Mommi murder mystery that knows exactly how ridiculous is, the whole cast in on the joke.” — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

8. Blockers

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“These lesbians are adorable and they’re supported by the people they talk to about their sexuality; it’s actually one of the happiest gay storylines I’ve seen in a movie. It’s rare that a high school movie gives audiences a chance to root for one of the main girl characters to get another girl, but that’s exactly what this movie does.” — Mey Rude

7. Disobedience

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6. Can You Ever Forgive Me?

5. Colette

“The story of Colette is only a fragment of her life, the one in which France’s most prolific writer realizes she cannot be contained; not by her want of a dowry; not by her lack of education or formal training; not by the laws governing sexual conduct and gender presentation in turn-of-the-century Paris; not even by the room her husband locks her in to write her Claudine series, which he publishes under his name… On the whole, though, Colette is a lush, brilliantly scored, perfectly acted, beautifully directed biopic about an iconoclastic bisexual woman many modern scholars believe deserves to share the title of Greatest French Writer with Proust. Her legend is realized in Westmoreland’s film.” — Heather Hogan

4. The Favourite

“The most stunning thing about The Favourite isn’t the dialogue, which features the word “cunt-stuck” more than once; or the improvised break dancing to Handel; or the cheeky camera work; or even the dazzling acting. The most stunning thing about The Favourite is how it slices open three queer women and lets their messy humanity bleed all over you, the way it adamantly refuses to allow you to love or hate any of them.” — Heather Hogan

3. The Miseducation of Cameron Post

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“There are lots of ways I could review Desiree Akhavan’s film adaptation of The Miseducation of Cameron Post. I could tell you that its unhurried character exploration, quiet charm, and nuanced social critique are Sundance catnip and no wonder it won the Grand Jury Prize when it premiered there this winter. I could tell you it distills the source material to its essence while maintaining the spirit of Emily M. Danforth‘s beloved novel. I could compare it to its queer cinematic matriarch — softer than But I’m a Cheerleader, the quintessential queer conversion therapy movie; sharper, too; less camp, more satire. Warmer than Disobedience, the other major lesbian movie centered on oppressive patriarchal religions thati hit theaters this year. Harsher — though still hopeful, in its way — than Hearts Beat Loud, the other coming-of-age lesbian indie film that hit theaters this year.” — Heather Hogan

2. Rafiki

“Rafiki tells the story of two girls from rival political families who fall in love against the odds. Seven years in the making, Rafiki is directed by a Kenyan woman, Wanuri Kahiu, and features Kenyan women as lead characters. It’s based off the 2007 Caine Prize winning short story “Jambula Tree” by Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko. In short, it is Black African Woman Excellence at its best… an inconvenient love story for a country that wants to bury its queer history; present and past. But as history has proven so often, only one side of this story will be remembered: that of the victors.” — Kari 

1. Heart Beats Loud

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“I just love this movie. It’s light, perhaps even fluffy, and yes a bit twee. But you know what, who cares? When was the last time a motion picture centered itself on the premise that a teenage, mixed race, black lesbian is worthy of support and love from everyone surrounding her? It’s simple and tender and because of those things it’s groundbreaking. It sneaks right up on you and barrels into your heart.” — Carmen Phillips

“The Miseducation of Cameron Post” Director Desiree Akhavan Makes Queer Women’s Movies Because She Just Loves Queer Women

When I hopped on the phone with The Miseducation of Cameron Post director Desiree Akhavan after I saw the movie on opening weekend, we both stopped each other in our tracks. I startled her when I told her I’d grown up in an evangelical Christian world almost identical to the one portrayed in her film; and she startled me when she told me nothing had changed about her approach to the movie during the 2016 election. Then we both said, “Of course.” Of course I, a lesbian teen suffocating in the closet with absolutely no pop culture representation to show me the way, would grow up and become a professional queer TV and film critic. And of course she, a second generation Iranian-American immigrant whose parents moved to New York following the Iranian revolution, wouldn’t have needed the rise of Trumpism to convince her a film about the politics of evangelical Christianity is still relevant.

There’s something special about being a queer critic talking to a queer filmmaker — and vice-versa, I suppose. There are lots of of courses. And these conversations are rare. Most queer films, especially the ones that succeed in the mainstream, are written and directed and produced and edited by men. And the same goes for queer film criticism: men, men, men.

“It’s weird when you release a film and read reviews by a bunch of older dudes who are like, ‘I don’t get it.'” Akhavan tells me.

“Right,” I say.

“Right,” she says.

“Because it’s not for them,” we say in unison.

The feeling I get when I’m talking to Desiree Akhavan is the feeling I got when I was watching Cameron Post: that I can relax because she gets it, that I don’t need to explain myself or be on guard, that we’re speaking the same language rooted in shared queer pop culture experiences (or lack thereof). It’s nice because it’s uncommon, but it’s also nice because pop culture is how Cam relates to the world, too.

When we’re discussing some of the more baffling reviews Cameron Post received, I tell her she’s somehow managed to miss out on the go-to men usually lean on when they’re writing about queer women’s films — comparing them to Blue Is the Warmest Color. She laughs, and then groans. “It’s probably because I am on record about how much I hate the sex in that movie!”

I assure her every queer woman hates the sex in that movie. She’s pleased, but not as pleased as when I tell her how authentic the sex in Cameron Post is. It’s the first time I’ve forgotten to feel weird watching women have sex with each other in a movie theater with men, probably because nothing about the way the sex is filmed is for men.

“Good,” Akhavan says. “I want to prove that money can be made off of women’s sexual stories. It’s not just a queer thing. It’s about women receiving pleasure, and giving pleasure. It’s still completely taboo.”

It’s not queer desire that’s still taboo. It’s queer women’s desire. “The Guardian just did this piece about how there are so many films like Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon that get these big releases,” she says. “Why aren’t we seeing queer women’s stories being backed and celebrated in the same way?”

Because our culture is terrified of women’s sexuality, we both say. Of course, we both say.

She laughs. “But I believe if we stick it out, we can prove money can be made off of women’s desires for each other.”

So far she’s right. Even though it took two months for Cameron Post to find a distributor after it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year — something Akhavan drily calls “surprising” — the film has exceeded expectations at the box office. It had the highest per screen average of indie films when it opened at two theaters in New York City, will land on 73 screens this weekend, and is ultimately eyeing 250 screens for its full run.

“That’s such a clear example of an audience’s engagement determining the future of a film,” Akhavan says, “If our opening weekend was low, that wouldn’t have happened. But people showed that there was an audience and a demand out there. You can go online and request a film. The actions audiences take have a tangible result. If this movie does well, it won’t be as hard for the next woman to make her movie.”

I’m always glad to talk about queer sex on-screen with another queer woman, but my favorite part of Cameron Post was how it treated the queer kids at God’s Promise. It didn’t make them into the butt of any jokes. Yes, the movie is funny (very, very funny), and at times rightly scathing in its critique of evangelical Christianity, but the queer teens themselves are treated with so much respect. Which was, of course, on purpose.

“These supporting characters can be hilarious in some ways, but we wanted each of them to have a full story. We did a pass of the script from each perspective,” Akhavan tells me. “It’s about giving dignity to all of your characters. We held with Helen singing karaoke for a good long time, for example, because I wanted to show how serious she is about it. When she prays before she sings, it seems funny, but when we hold on her, it’s like, ‘Oh, she prays because she cares.’ It’s not a joke.”

After watching The Miseducation of Cameron Post and talking at length with the woman who played the biggest role in adapting it to the big screen, that’s my main takeaway: that she knows what it’s like to care. Akhavan made this movie because she cared deeply about Emily Danforth’s book. She makes movies, in general, because she cares about the art of filmmaking. She makes queer movies because she cares about queer women.

When I have the occasional good fortune to talk to a queer filmmaker, they usually tell me they don’t want to be pigeonholed as a queer filmmaker. Desiree Akhavan doesn’t tell me that. She tells me she didn’t set out to be a queer filmmaker, but “you follow what you love.”

The Cameron Post of Danforth’s novel would like that answer, a lot. “I just liked girls,” she says when she’s figuring it all out, “because I couldn’t help not to.”

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For more information about The Miseducation of Cameron Post, check out the film’s official website, and follow Desireee Akhavan on Twitter. 

“The Miseducation of Cameron Post” Is a Hopeful, Hilarious, Heartbreaking Lesbian Coming-of-Age Story

There are lots of ways I could review Desiree Akhavan’s film adaptation of The Miseducation of Cameron Post. I could tell you that its unhurried character exploration, quiet charm, and nuanced social critique are Sundance catnip and no wonder it won the Grand Jury Prize when it premiered there this winter. I could tell you it distills the source material to its essence while maintaining the spirit of Emily M. Danforth‘s beloved novel. I could compare it to its queer cinematic matriarch — softer than But I’m a Cheerleader, the quintessential queer conversion therapy movie; sharper, too; less camp, more satire. Warmer than Disobedience, the other major lesbian movie centered on oppressive patriarchal religions thati hit theaters this year. Harsher — though still hopeful, in its way — than Hearts Beat Loud, the other coming-of-age lesbian indie film that hit theaters this year.

Or I could tell you that when I watched it this weekend I laughed louder and quicker than anyone in the theater, clenched my fists to the point of leaving marks on my palms, and found myself leaning in, in, in to get closer to Chloë Grace Moretz (to comfort Cam with my presence?) even though the camera was pushed in on her as far as it would go. And that, when the film was over, I walked the two blocks back to Union Square, descended into the sticky summer underground air of the New York City subway, squeezed into an open spot near the end of the platform, and sobbed so hard my shoulders shook.

The story goes that Cameron Post’s parents die and she moves in with her evangelical aunt in rural Montana and falls in love with another girl and when they get caught having sex, Cam’s aunt sends her to God’s Promise, a conversion therapy camp where she joins other gay teenagers in addressing the roots of their “sin,” their “SSA” (same-sex attraction). Reverend Rick, a “reformed homosexual,” runs the place with his psychiatrist sister Lydia. He’s all, “Aw shucks, Jesus saved me” and she’s all, “Cameron is already a masculine name; you don’t need to exacerbate your gender confusion by shortening it to Cam.” Lydia is the closest thing Cameron Post has to a bad guy, but the story’s real conflict is whether or not Cam is going to buy into their bullshit. It’s 1993. There’s no tumblr. The internet is hardly invented. Ellen isn’t even out yet.

It would have been easy for Akhavan to paint Christianity as a cartoon villain, and don’t get me wrong, she rightly needles the hell out of it. Over-earnest acoustic praise songs about falling in love with the son of God, Christian rock concerts as a cheap imitation of the music Cam craves, a Jazzercise with Jesus VHS tape. Akhavan invites you to laugh at the absurdity and audacity of it, but then she zooms in on these gay teenagers who just want to use their voices for the glory of God, and watch NFL games with their dads without it giving them “gender confusion,” and follow in the footsteps of their Biblical heroes. “There was given to me a thorn in the flesh,” Mark, the boy with the biggest faith, the one closest to reform cries. “I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong!”

He believes.

Almost all of them believe.

Almost.

Cameron finds her people in self-proclaimed Jane Fonda, a photographer who grows her own weed way out in the woods and is at God’s Promise because her hippie mom married a devout Christian man; and Adam Red Eagle, who identifies as a Lakotan two-spirit and winkte, and landed at camp because his dad decided to join a church so he could run for office. They are played by Sasha Lane, a queer woman of color you already know from American Honey and Hearts Beat Loud and Forrest Goodluck of The Revenant, respectively. Jane and Adam’s spirits are not broken, but they’re deeply subdued. They rebel how they can, sneaking away to smoke and mock Rick and Lydia, but mostly by holding firm to the belief that there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re the only ones at God’s Promise who don’t think they need to be cured.

Moretz’s performance is understated, assured. Surrounded by people who claim the authority of the creator of the universe to condemn and change Cam’s behavior, Moretz remains still. It’s heroic.

Lovingly woven into the God’s Promise narrative are plentiful flashbacks of Cam falling in love and exploring her sexuality with her best friend. Watching her watch Desert Hearts to watch her best friend’s reaction to it is one of the realest things I’ve ever seen on-screen. But that’s not all — it’s the way the lesbian teens at God’ Promise talk about the girls they fell for, the ways they were outed, the circumstances and behaviors the adults in their life blamed for their queerness (sports, short hair, masculine clothes, masculine role models). It’s the way the gay teenage girls look at each other, touch each other, the terrified hopeful ecstasy of it all. There’s no male gaze in this movie, none whatsoever. Desiree Akhavan is a queer woman and her screenplay co-writer Cecilia Frugiuele is a queer woman too. They refuse to apologize for female desire, or to tilt it to make it more palatable to men. It matters.

Cameron ultimately finds her salvation in the truth she suspected from the moment she arrived at God’s Promise, that Rick and Lydia don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, that there’s nothing more dangerous than the tyranny of a weak or compassionless True Believer. It takes a tragedy for her to look Rick in the eyes and confront him with that truth (and, yes, that self-harm scene from the book is in the movie).

I cried when I left The Miseducation of Cameron Post because a movie about conversion therapy in 1993 shouldn’t be as relevant now as it was back then. I cried because it was made by queer women for queer women. I cried because we don’t have to grade lesbian films on a curve anymore. I cried for those kids, in real life and in the movie, who believed. Mostly I cried because I’m a 39-year-old lesbian who’s been professionally critiquing queer media for ten years and I watched this film in Greenwich Village, a mile from the home I share with my girlfriend of eight years — but if I’d been born a few years earlier, or acted on my gayness a few years before I did, or with a different person, or in a place we could have been caught, or if my mother had found out first, in the rural Georgia town where I was born and raised and reborn by the grace of God and baptized in the name of his son Jesus, Cameron Post could have been me.

I laughed, too, though. At the quick-cut to Desert Hearts. At all the Christian pop culture shenanigans. And when one of the God’s Promise kids said to Cam, with such horrified earnestness, on her first day, “I don’t know who you are but I can tell just by looking at you that you’re a dyke!” I laughed even harder than she did. It’s rare to see a lesbian coming of age story this good on film. It’s even rarer to see a movie where your trauma is reflected back at you, but you’re in on all the jokes that helped you make it to today.

Also.Also.Also: “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” Trailer Looks So Good and Other Stories for Your Pre-Weekend

THURSDAY!! It’s like Friday! But, in miniature!

Let me congratulate you on making it another week. Laneia will be back to guide you through the headlines on Monday, but I had a wonderful time with each and every one of you. Popsicles! Journaling about Gratitude! We had it all. Thank you for not calling me out about my overindulgence in Beyoncé. Here’s some news from the rest of the week.

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Queer as in F*ck You

THIS MOVIE ALREADY LOOKS SO EXCELLENT AND LISTEN I JUST CAN’T WAIT ANYMORE.

The trailer for The Miseducation of Cameron Post dropped yesterday afternoon. The Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner is based on Emily M. Danforth’s 2012 novel of the same name. It takes place in 1993 and follows teenage Cameron Post (Chloë Moretz) as she’s forced to attend gay conversion therapy after being caught having sex with another girl. Keen eyes will also peep Sasha Lane in the trailer, who you perhaps also saw in this summer’s Hearts Beat Loud? If you haven’t, you definitely should.

We’ve covered Cameron Post a lot at Autostraddle (Check out this time when author Emily Danforth answered 38 of your questions about the book!, Or this time when she returned to talk to us about the movie!, Or this interview with Cameron Post director Desiree Akhavan!), and now the big moment is finally here! Word on the street is Cameron Post will be released in select cities starting August 3.

“I built the GenForward Survey, a nationally representative survey of over 1,750 young adults ages 18-34. The survey is conducted bimonthly and includes oversamples of African-American, Latinx, and Asian-American young adults, ensuring we can accurately represent their positions and the positions of all millennials on important issues facing the country.” — Calling all my queer data nerds! You’re going to enjoy this brief breakdown of an ongoing project conducted black lesbian political scientist Dr. Cathy Cohen.

The Realities of Having A Period As A Transgender Man.

Lez Heat Things Up: The 16 Best Lesbian Movie Kisses Of All Time.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by LOLA MullenLowe (@lolamullenlowe)

These Activists Used Soccer Jerseys to Protest Homophobia & Anti-LGBTQ Laws in Russia. (The men’s World Cup finals are this Sunday. I have no idea what’s going on. I just root for whatever team has the most people of color in it. That means on Sunday, I’m pulling for France! We have fun.)

In Monday’s column we began a discussion about the attempted “take over” of London Pride by anti-trans protestors. Here’s a deeper dive and a follow up: Why Are Some Feminists In The UK Freaking Out About Trans Rights?

And then on Monday night, Trump selected Brett Kavanaugh to be his choice for the vacated Supreme Court seat. By now you’re probably all caught up on that news. Let’s also pay attention to The Five Court Cases That Could Change the Future of LGBT Rights.

Hey! Did you check out the official launch of Sapphic Lasers’ “Dyke Bars Never Last” music video, because you definitely should!

Yes, Lesbians Do It Better. I feel like we circle back to this every few years, but I’ll still take another victory lap. Statistically speaking, women who are engaging in queer sex are having more a satisfying sex life.

Pat yourself on the back for all the wonderful decisions you’re making.

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Saw This, Thought of You

From The New York Times, Why Breast-Feeding Scares Donald Trump.

File this under, “Duh! Things Queer Women Already Knew”: Women Were Pirates, Too.

“Public space belongs to everyone. If racists don’t like hearing Spanish being spoken in a deli, or having Native American teens on a campus tour, or seeing black folks going on about their lives, they should just stay home.” — The Social Shaming of Racists Is Working, by Laila Lalami at The Nation.

Senator Tammy Duckworth on Why Kids Separated at the Border Still Need Your Help. (Speaking of, from The New York Times, For Many LGBT Migrants, North of the Border Is No Refuge. And from The Cut, Exactly How Many Separated Immigrant Families Have Been Reunited? Answer: Not many.)

The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. As I took the four steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared, “It’s time for you to start having sex!”

My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life as a rural poor Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. I was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist. My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological positions, but she had good sense. She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “Start having sex.” She meant real good sex. Sex that left you with telltale signs that you had been touched right and handled with care. I didn’t exude sexuality. I didn’t exude grown womanhood. I did not look like a Black girl comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t. I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh.

Grown-Woman Theology: Lessons of Race, Blackness, and Power from a Self-Described Nerdy Black Girl. It’s an excerpt from Dr. Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.

Well then! Looks like I’ve found my dream job! Q&A with Sorry to Bother You’s Costume Designer on Dressing Tessa Thompson.

For anyone else like me, who just nods along when a cute girl starts complaining about “Mercury in retrograde” or “the eclipse over Mars” or whatever, I have found us a cheat sheet! Your Guide to This Summer’s Astrological Mess of Retrogrades and Eclipses.

Fighting Fascism at the UK’s Feminist Antifa Martial Arts Gym.

How To Sleep When It’s Hot Outside & You Don’t Have AC.

While we’re on the subject of “How To”: 10 Ways How To Quit Your Job Gracefully. (Just in case. You never know.)

More than half a million people went to last weekend’s Essence Festival. That’s more than the annual attendance of Coachella AND SXSW. Hell, it’s almost as much as the attendance of those those festivals combined. And yet, because the Essence Festival primarily is attended by black women, it doesn’t get the same media shine. Well, I’m using my tiny little platform to change some of that. Here’s 25 black women showing out with their best fashion last weekend in New Orleans.

13 Books by Asian and Asian American Authors That You Could Be Reading While We All Wait For Crazy Rich Asians To Hit Theaters Next Month.

Nipple Piercings Aren’t As Scary As You Think They Are. (I think they definitely are, but hey! You do you.)

And finally, have we talked about how much I love our Community Editor Vanessa Friedman? Because I really love her:

https://twitter.com/vanessapamela/status/1017146241916911616

Have a great weekend!

Desiree Akhavan on Sex Scenes, Spectatorship, and Shooting ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’: The Autostraddle Interview

Featured image courtesy of Variety.

emily m. danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a book obsessed with the movies: Personal Best and The Hunger. Elizabeth Taylor’s gasps and Dracula’s thick accent. Even a Christian aerobics videocassette is worth the time of day. To witness Cameron come to life in her very own film — to be able to look at this gay girl from Montana who made a personal brand out of looking — is an endless treat. The adaptation, directed by Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior) and co-written by Akhavan and producer Cecilia Frugiuele, premiered at Sundance this January.

Here’s how it goes: It’s 1993 and Cameron (Chloë Moretz) has been shipped off to a conversion therapy camp called God’s Promise after she’s caught with a girl from her Bible study group, Coley (Quinn Shephard). Yanked away from everything she holds dear — a beloved copy of The Breeders’ Last Splash included — Cameron approaches “treatment” with mixed feelings and finds chosen family in hippie Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane) and two-spirit Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck), two God’s Promise residents who know how to score pot and meet the farcical program’s requirements with minimal effort and maximum self-preservation. Cameron, Jane, and Adam are a motley crew, worlds away from the promenade of high school hallways. But to viewers, they couldn’t seem more cool, delivering verbal comebacks and making moves we wish we could were we in their place.

I never want to relive high school or even revisit it undercover like Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, but Cameron Post’s honest, good-humored approach to first love, religious hypocrisy, and the adolescent struggle against adult totalitarianism made me swoon and feel something resembling nostalgia. Despite the serious subject matter, Cameron Post marks the first time I’ve seen a feature film about a band of queer teens that’s felt wholly sincere and unfettered.

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For filmmakers, the Sundance equivalent of God’s Promise is probably the Filmmaker Co-Op’s Media Room on Main Street in Park City, Utah. For every twenty-minute conversation a director has with a journalist that validates her creative choices in the Co-Op’s soundproof glass press rooms, there might be two where she’s urged to stop what she’s been doing and repent for their cinematic sins, whatever they may be. The afternoon after Cameron Post’s big reveal and the film’s premiere party — where the cast, crew, and their admirers danced to 4 Non-Blondes into the wee hours — the director, navigating a seven hour-time difference via her London home base, was totally lucid and down to talk about making Cameron.

It all started in 2012, when Akhavan scored a copy of Cameron Post before it went to press. “When my girlfriend at the time and I first read the book, we loved it. We were obsessed with it and gave it to anybody we met,” she said. “Whether it was a birthday or a holiday: ‘Read this, please, you’re gonna love it.’ Because it was the first honest depiction of growing up gay that felt really human, funny, and not like taking your medicine.”

The admiration was mutual: danforth was a big fan of The Slope, the wry web series that Akhavan co-created with then-girlfriend Ingrid Jungermann (Women Who Kill) in 2010. “Desi first reached out to me about Cameron way back before it was even published,” emily said. “She emailed a really lovely note …so we just exchanged our little fan letters back and forth and then we met up a few times in the years after.”

After Akhavan’s first feature, Appropriate Behavior, premiered to critical acclaim at Sundance, she gave danforth a holler. “Summer of 2014, I think, when she was making the rounds and trying to figure out what project to do next, she reached out again. We had a long phone call during which she more formally expressed her interest in adapting the novel. I remember pacing around our backyard for an hour or so, talking with her and just being so excited about her interest and ideas. And right from the start, before any official option agreement was in place or she and Cecilia had started writing any of the screenplay, it was pretty clear that they’d be focusing on Cam’s time at God’s Promise, which is really only the final third of the novel. But, I mean, this is something we talked a lot about and I was clear about from the jump. It’s a huge book and they were planning to make a 90-minute film, so obviously many things were going to have to be cut.”

“My girlfriend and I would play that game of, ‘Okay, if this were a movie, what would it be?’ It was definitely God’s Promise, no doubt,” Akhavan said. At nearly 500 pages, the novel’s considerably long for young adult fiction. The book’s first two sections indulge in the idle days of youth when the hands on the clock might move more than the body, but the mind roams the most. It’s only in the third section that sudden, course-altering changes are made, and Cameron is sent away to reparative therapy. “For this story to shine, it needs to be about one particular moment and one particular battle. For me, that was Cameron going into God’s Promise having a sense of who she is and then having to question that; what does that do to her? And what does meeting other gay kids do to her?” Akhavan said. “There’s so much beauty, good intention, and kindness, but I really wanted to reflect the ugliness in the book and how honest it felt and how …real.”

I mentioned to her that, while danforth’s novel received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and spoke to those who were no strangers to being gay in small places, a handful of readers still found the book’s final pages too grim. For them, the novel was a dismal portrait of queer life that debuted at a time when LGBT Americans seemed to be urging one another to maintain optimism and resilience; big gay rights were on the way! “Throughout this book there just isn’t any hope, no understanding, no outside support. Nothing,” one reader remarked. “…all we really want is a good lesbian love story!” bemoaned another.

Given her movie’s focus on the most challenging stage of Cameron’s life, I asked Akhavan if she’s concerned about receiving similar feedback about her film; she didn’t need to think twice. “No, those people are fucking pussies,” she said. “A lot of the time when you have marginalized characters — like queers and people of color—in books and films, they’re treated so preciously and they’re martyrs. I didn’t want her to be a martyr; Cameron’s never that in the book.”

If we want to get technical, there are two disparate groups of “pussies” who’ll find solidarity in their distaste for The Miseducation of Cameron Post adaptation: 1.) Those mentioned above and 2.) the chaste institutions like the Cape Henlopen School Board in Massachusetts, which gave the novel a cursory glance in 2014 and deemed it “not appropriate” for the young readers they insisted upon keeping innocent, pure, and …completely inept. Luckily for Cameron, the best queer narratives always seem to simultaneously ruffle the feathers of liberal contentment and conservative values.

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Akhavan’s earnest story of queer subversion opens with a montage of a familiar heterosexual ritual: the big-haired, long-lashed, corsaged rite of passage known as prom, circa 1993. Cameron humors her Aunt Ruth (Kerry Butler), allowing herself to be preened to the nines and only wiping away the excess makeup when her guardian turns away. Cameron is an emotionally intelligent Midwestern kid with manners; manners that prevent feelings from being hurt, that evade unwanted attention, and permit her to attend prom in closer proximity to Coley than her male date — until, later that evening, he opens the car door and Cameron spills out with the girl on top of her. Chloë Moretz’ performance is dynamic in a way I wasn’t fully prepared for. Her Cameron is carefree one moment, handsome the next, and totally gutting upon her realization that unconditional love isn’t.

It’s on this note that Cameron is expedited to God’s Promise, where Jane Fonda immediately introduces herself by snapping Cameron’s photo. The Polaroid is meant to be something Cameron can reference throughout her conversion to see how far she’s come since that first miserable day — and she does, but mostly to assess the gradual fading of her heartbreak, not her same-sex attraction (or “SSA,” as the God’s Promise residents call it). Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle) and her test subject/brother Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr.) lead the campaign against homosexuality and gender transgression with a mix of selective Bible study, group therapy, and pointless worksheets. Cameron manages to eke by, attributing her SSA to varsity sports. Her peers — especially those who believe they can change, give everything, and fail miserably — face far worse fates than Marsh’s ice queen glares and soggy cereal for breakfast.

Given the subject matter, comparisons between Jamie Babbit’s 1999 comedy But I’m a Cheerleader and The Miseducation of Cameron Post are inevitable, despite the films being really different in color palette, style, and tone. The only ‘camp’ in Cameron Post is God’s Promise; that desolate strip of cabins far removed from the gentler world for which Cameron, Jane, and Adam ache. There’s no RuPaul in baby blue hot pants, no nearby gay bar for them to sneak into like Natasha Lyonne’s Megan and Clea Duvall’s Graham. Their escape is modest, arriving in the form of a truck heading in an unknown but hopeful direction, The Graduate-style.

The comparisons between Cheerleader and Cameron aren’t useless, though. They open up the door to assessing how things have both changed and remained the same for queer youth and the filmmakers who try to do them justice. Twenty years ago, Megan was sent to conversion therapy for exhibiting cultural symptoms of lesbianism (owning a Melissa Etheridge poster, etc.) rather than actually sleeping with girls. In classic teen romance style, she’s kept virginal until deflowering suits the narrative arc — and even then, Megan and Graham keep their clothes on. Knowing what it was up against, Cheerleader wisely elected to laugh through the tears rather than harshly indict the “pray away the gay” adults who caused the waterworks in the first place. And yet: the director was still punished. Babbit went through hell to secure an R-rating for her film. And while the MPAA demanded that she cut Natasha Lyonne’s tame masturbation scene, they permitted Jason Biggs fucking apple pies in theaters across the Bible Belt.

In 2018, Cameron is able to say in deadpan what Cheerleader had to veil with smart humor in 1999. As we see in the prom sequence and her flashbacks to hooking up with Coley the first time, there’s no denying Cameron was a healthy, sexually active teen before arriving at God’s Promise. Akhavan’s found intricate ways of using sex to convey what many queer women experienced during adolescence, but never thought we’d see in a movie house: sensations and dynamics that extend past that overrepresented moment of initial epiphany and processing.

“I don’t think it’s overstating to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals, and that its messages came in Technicolor and musical montages and fades and jump cuts and silver-screen legends and B-movie nobodies and villains to root for and good guys to hate.”
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Part One: Summer 1989

When Cameron and Coley first have sex, it’s as the hotel scene from Donna Deitch’s lesbian classic Desert Hearts (1985) plays on the television across the room. Cameron introduced the film as a means to come out to Coley with images (instead of the labels that still feel too certain). In the book, the sex scene Cameron communicates with is from The Hunger, Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire movie starring Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. When the rights to the latter proved tricky to secure, Akhavan settled on Desert Hearts. Granting the groundbreaking independent film that Deitch once promoted with D.I.Y. flyers residency within her indie successor was the right choice. Call it Divine intervention. Desert Hearts has experienced a surprise revival over the last few months, achieving Criterion status and enjoying a run at Sundance in 2017. “It’s crazy because we’d already shot the film at that point. I remember being so shocked of the coincidence of that film just being in the lesbian canon for decades and suddenly being watched again,” she said. The scene brings together three eras of gay culture: 80s, 90s, and present day (the viewer) in a way I’d never experienced before. Often, queer culture is depicted as a groundbreaking, state-of-the-art thing rather than the continuation of a rich lineage. (Deitch hasn’t seen The Miseducation of Cameron Post yet, but she’s looking forward to it.)

There’s a similar moment of rich intergenerational dialogue in Appropriate Behavior, Akhavan’s dry comedy about professional, sexual, and racial in-betweenness in a place renowned for its self-assuredness (if not its self-importance): Brooklyn. Persian-American Chirin lies in her strange new bed post-breakup, attempting to wade through the copy of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues her ex bought her when they were still together. She eventually gives up, discarding the esteemed lesbian novel for some OKCupid cruising. The moment says so much about Chirin, her unmoored life, and her callous relationship to highbrow queer culture. (The late Feinberg, who celebrated “the pleasure of the weightless state between here and there” in Stone Butch Blues, probably wouldn’t fault her for it.)

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Roughly a month before The Miseducation of Cameron Post’s world premiere, Desiree tweeted an IndieWire piece ranking the best sex scenes of the 21st century. The list included a number of sound queer encounters, including Carol’s breathy I never looked like that and Mulholland Drive’s hallucinogenic doppelgänger bang.

Blue is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche’s excessive adaptation of a an emotionally deficient graphic novel, somehow topped the list. And Desiree, like a number of queer spectators, disagreed and fired back accordingly.

“Dear IndieWire I love you, but saying the sex in Blue is the Warmest ‘respected the essence of lesbian sex — raw, inventive, and unmatched in its intimacy’ is bullshit,” she tweeted. “The sex in that film is bullshit… The only worse thing than the sex in that film was the abuse that director made his actors suffer in order to get such a bullshit piece of wank bank fodder. Let’s stop celebrating bullshit.”

Because women are often relegated to the defensive when it comes to lazy representation and the awful stuff that happens to us IRL, I asked Desiree to play offense for a moment: What makes a good sex scene? Which films are on her ‘best of’ list?

“I really love this film by Catherine Breillat called Fat Girl. There’s a really long sequence in it in which a girl loses her virginity. But you know she’s coerced and it’s while her younger sister’s in the bedroom. It’s an incredible sequence and it’s honest. I think sex scenes should be used to communicate something about those characters in that story. So often, it’s just used to communicate that sex is …happening.”

She went on to mention two other films, Lust, Caution and Diary of a Teenage Girl, that also feature love scenes resembling Cameron’s vacation bible school sand art. Each red-hot encounter is layered upon other tensions: occupational, familial, legal, or the all-too-relatable anxiety of being found out. Some of the scenes are haunting, featuring what some might consider amoral or even illegal behavior. But they are responsibly-helmed. Our lives can be ugly and contentious; it’s only fair that the female gaze expresses this from time-to-time.

When I caught Teenage Girl for the first time last summer, I wasn’t struck by the graphic nature of Alexander Skarsgård’s scenes with Bel Powley. I was struck by how the guy’s girlfriend/girl’s drug-addled mother, played by Kristen Wiig, seems to infiltrate every scene. When Powley’s character asks Skarsgård’s to take her photo after they have sex for the first time, the viewer anticipates her mother discovering it (this, we eventually learn, is quite the red herring).

Fat Girl, which was temporarily banned by the Ontario Film Review Board for its depictions of teen sexuality, does a similar trick. It’s impossible to escape a young girl’s all-seeing eye as her beautiful older sister mercilessly comes of age. Even when these scenes involve a man, women are tasked with the lead role, theme, and narrative.

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The director is no stranger to Rose Troche/Guin Turner-style collaborations with her girlfriends-turned-exes. Frugiuele produced Appropriate Behavior and co-drafted the script for Cameron Post; her breakup with Jungermann was written into The Slope. It’s less of a queer cliché than it is a testament to Akhavan’s greatest strength: artistic collaboration with women who also believe in the power of shoestring indie film.

In the weeks since Sundance, I’ve spoken with a handful of people who had stakes in Cameron Post’s shoot in autumn 2016. Unprompted, each has made it a point to emphasize Akhavan’s commitment to creating to building a nurturing, productive, and safe on-set environment where everyone was on the same page.

Cinematographer Ashley Connor (Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl”, Madeline’s Madeline), who was tasked with bringing Cameron’s blues and browns to life with what emily danforth calls “camera magic,” first met Akhavan over karaoke in Maryland when they were both touring with films. “When she was gearing up to do Cameron Post, she called me,” Connor said. “We had a meeting and the conversation flowed easily. We connected on a lot of similar films that we love and the way that we talked about the movie. It was a really easy process.”

Pre-production location scout Jillian Stricker (The Big Sick, Little Men) heard about the film through a co-producer and immediately wanted in. “I had an intro call with Desiree and Cecelia and loved them both instantly. I not only liked the script, but felt inspired and driven to help make into a film.” Sticker’s biggest scouting success was Riedlbauer’s, the German-American resort in the Catskills that serves as God’s Promise in the film. “I had guidance from my girlfriend who lived in upstate NY for years and knew about this place and I found many more just like it,” said Striker. “But after searching for quite some time, seeing how many options there were, and unfortunately realizing that many owners were conservative and not willing to be a part of this story, it felt like a win to not only find a place that worked well creatively but that supported the film and values of the team.”

danforth also visited the set several times. “The cast and crew were really generous with me and, from my perspective, with each other,” she told me. “People were hanging out between their scenes and in the evenings, partly because so many of them were actually living at Riedlbauer for so many weeks together …I saw actors helping the crew with various jobs on days they didn’t have call times for hours at a time.”

When the U.S. Presidential election fell during the 21-day shoot, Akhavan turned what could’ve been the worst distraction — a reparative therapy proponent being named Vice President — into a catalyst for good cinema. “Film sets always become microcosms and alternative forms of community for this period of time that you’re all working together. But there was something about living, working, and going through the election that made it unique. Desiree really made the set a really loving environment.”

Two of the film’s actors felt personally impacted by the moment: Sasha Lane, who identifies as gay and also has a gay brother, and Chloë Moretz, who witnessed two of her brothers endure relentless bullying after they came out.

“The morning after Trump’s election, there was a bright and early call time, and many people were, of course, pretty distraught, so Desi addressed everyone on set that day about how, in the wake of this new administration, Mike Pence in the White House, this film, its story, would matter in ways they couldn’t have anticipated even the day before,” danforth told me. “And she asked everyone to take stock of that and hold onto it in their disappointment and anger and grief, all of the things so many of us were feeling that day.”

While Cameron Post isn’t filmed in the Montana of its source text, it doesn’t make the subject matter any less real. “Truly, these camps could have and unfortunately do exist in the Northeast, as well,” Jillian explained.

She’s right. New York didn’t ban the practice of conversion therapy until last year, with 24 assembly members opposing the ban. NYC followed suit this winter. If you poke around enough, you can find pictures of these now-abandoned (un)amusement parks for queers. Some conversion facilities are more subtle in appearance — like the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, which looks less like God’s Promise and more like a bodega that’s eluded gentrification’s tell-tale sheen.

As for Montana: There’s no ban on the books yet. But there’s always a possibility that Cameron Post could change that.

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The Miseducation of Cameron Post received the Sundance 2018 Grand Jury Prize for Drama, an award that has gone to a handful of queer interest films in previous years, including Pariah, Poison, Waiting for the Moon, and Welcome to the Dollhouse. The panel of industry professionals that went to the wall for Cameron Post included Rachel Morrison, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Octavia Spencer. Despite receiving the prestigious Award and glowing reviews from foremost critics, a company has yet to step up to distribute Cameron for theatrical release.

Emily Danforth Is Drawn Back to Montana and We’re Drawn Back to “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” (the Movie!)

In 2012, Emily Danforth published her novel, “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” following the story of a young girl in Montana who discovers her sexuality and is sent to a conversion therapy program. The novel was well-received critically, and it opened up a conversation for and about rural queerness and how living in sparsely populated, conservative places in the United States shapes those experiences. The book was adapted into a film starring Chloe Grace Moretz, which is scheduled to premiere at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January.

Danforth is writing her next novel on a yearlong sabbatical from teaching creative writing and literature courses at Rhode Island College, and took some time out of her busy day to chat with Autostraddle staff writer Molly Priddy, also a Montanan, about the upcoming film.

And to help set the mood of growing up queer in the ’90s, we’re peppering in some of Emily’s own pictures from her childhood in Miles City, Montana through her college years, because they’re sweet and amazing and all of the captions are her own. For example:

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Autostraddle: Tell us a little bit about your role in the film’s production!

Emily Danforth: In the official credited capacity I believe I’m listed as a consultant, but really I just think Desi (writer and director Desiree Akhavan) and Cecilia (screenplay writer Cecilia Frugiuele) just have been super generous including me on things. I didn’t write the screenplay, though I saw it and made notes, but I’ve been talking to Desi about this in one form or another for several years. It took a while before she had time to pursue this, and then a long time to get the option, write the screenplay and get funding sources.

This all happened unbelievably fast. Between August of 2016, when Desi actually came with me to Montana to filming in October of that year to now, it really does all feel like the most unreal of unreals.

I didn’t get to be at the set for the whole shoot, because I was teaching last year. I went once with my wife Erica and we got to go for a few days. I was in a daze of disbelief, touching people like, “Are you real?”

I’m not going to write that you went around set touching people.

Thank you for editing me, I didn’t actually touch anyone; I was just looking.

What has it been like to think up a little queer character from Montana with whom others identify and see her not only come to life in a book, but now on screen?

Cam’s readers and Cam’s fans are a small group but they’re such a dedicated group. It’s maybe not always people I would expect, either! It’s interesting to me is the 45-year-old person from New Jersey, a father of three who heard about it on NPR. He wrote me this really lovely letter! Probably not the reader I had in my head, but it’s awesome. Readers have taken Cam and made her their own.

Someone born of your own mind, like Cam, her taking on a new life for people independent of you and your thoughts, is that bizarre?

It is! But not in a bad way. I’ve only seen a taste of it, but a couple high schoolers during a visit to a school, approached me in the hallway and told me about some Cam fan fiction. This is not such a big franchise that in my wildest dreams did I think that Cam fan fiction existed, but it does.

Do you still talk to Cam?

There are a lot of unpublished pages of Cam’s story and I think about those sometimes. Where the book ends, I’m very pleased with that version, but it wasn’t ever the version I had in my head for the many years writing it. That wasn’t the end, it was more of the middle of the story. If it wasn’t for my agent kicking some sense into me I’d still be writing, Cam would be 87, and it would be “The Continuing Adventures of Cameron Post.”

I do think about her sometimes, I have this sense of my version of her unfinished story which maybe I’ll do something with that sometime. She does circle back to Montana eventually, after life in California.

Well that’s true, people do come back to Montana.

They do. Like a magnet you’re drawn back. I get it, I become my sappiest when I’m there. I feel infected by Montana in good and bad ways. I’m confronting this really specifically right now because my mom is moving out here to Rhode Island and she’s a lifelong Montanan. She was the anchoring reason for me to go back to Miles City, so now there’s really no reason. I’ll be back in Montana for sure, though.

[Several minutes of discussion about who we know in common, as all Montanans must do.]

It’s getting more acceptable for kids in Montana to identify as things other than straight. What I found striking about Cam’s situation, though, is that when I came out, it wasn’t as accepting, and I was very afraid I would be sent to a place like the conversion camp in your book.

People laughed at this a little bit, or didn’t take me seriously when I said it when the book came out five years ago, but they kind of get it now. I’ve always considered it kind of a historical novel, and that was interesting to me when people would so identify with Cam, and it’s upsetting because this is still what life looks like for them.

The conversion therapy, that felt like a very specific kind of therapy that I knew about back then. It was surprising to me the number of people who say, “No, this is still pretty close to what things look like for me,” and not just Montana readers but teen readers.

Did you ever think that Cam might be friends with the campers on But I’m a Cheerleader?

Cam would like to be friends with any gay or queer-identifying person she could find. But really, that was the one pop culture touchstone about conversion therapy. As a young queer person, I was soaking up every good or bad lesbian movie I could find, and that was a good one.

There’s just so many more options in terms of finding queer content today. That too feels fundamental – Cam going to the VHS store felt like a declaration, and that does not exist anymore, you don’t have to be ashamed that you rented Personal Best and the video guy at the store knows about it.

I think about how this book is a piece of history, and we don’t see a movement in local Montana schools about queer people existing. It’s important to remember what life was like before the internet here. To live that life and have that life in all of its horrible idiosyncrasies written down is so important.

Yeah! One of the reasons that I even write fiction about queer people is this notion of capturing histories. On a broader scale, having to learn about all the queer people and history we lost to time because it wasn’t recorded, and queer movements I didn’t know about, I had that feeling of, ‘Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this? Why am I in my dorm room at 3 a.m. reading this?’

On a more micro level, I had a great aunt who did a bunch of things for the military, back when women did not do this. By the time I would have known her, she was a great aunt, but years later, right when I came out, I learned she had all kinds of relationships with women, and there was a treasure trove of letters she had received. I was like, this should clearly be mine. I have an aunt, who shall not be named, who took it upon herself to burn those letters. She took it upon herself to erase queer history that she was uncomfortable with. I will never see those, I won’t know that part of the story. Think about all the people across the country who have similar stories.

Getting back to the movie, the book is set in Montana; is that the case for the film?

The hardest loss for me, and the one I fought the longest for, was that I really wanted it to be set in Montana, but there just was not a budget for it. They were hoping they could film at least a couple scenes there and cheat the rest, but it’s really hard to cheat Montana. People know. So it’s sort of upstate New York; I’ve seen a cut of the film and it’s sort of placeless in the film, they’re small-town Americans and it’s the ’90s.

Montana or not, I think that the film’s interpretation of God’s Promise, the conversion therapy center, is spot on.

Let’s talk about the actor playing Cam!

Chloe Grace Moretz, I think she’s great, she does a really beautiful job. The whole cast — I really think people gave beautiful performances, I feel really lucky about all of that.

It’s premiering at Sundance?

Yes! And it’ll be distributed at some point in 2018, but that’ll depend partially on what happens at Sundance. I’m going with my wife and a bunch of family members. I don’t know what that’s going to be like! We’ll get up on the mountain with all the fancy people – we’re excited, everybody’s excited.

I have a friend who’s gone to the festival for several years and she’s like, “You just have to be cool” and I’m like, “Have you met me? I’m not going to be cool if I’m on the bus with like Idris Elba!” I’m going to do my best to act normal.

People will be like, ‘You’re shaming Montana!’ by being uncool around stars, like I haven’t done that already in my 37 years. This time you’re really shaming Montana.

So, your new book includes queer history mixed in with current elements?

Now, nobody’s ever going to believe me but I’ve been writing this for years and it’s about the making of a queer movie, an idea I had before Cam was going to be a movie.

The movie that they’re making is based on a novel about the queer history of a women’s boarding school in Rhode Island. There are ghosts and there’s a contemporary story of the three queer girls involved making this movie and then the historical story of the boarding school.

That sounds awesome.

Thank you! I’m excited about it!

For more information on Emily Danforth, Cameron Post, and more, visit www.emdanforth.com. 

Chloe Grace Moretz And Sasha Lane Are Playing Gay In The Movie Adaptation Of “The Miseducation of Cameron Post”

Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post is one of the best queer YA novels ever written. We’ve talked about it a lot here on Autostraddle, so I’m very excited to say that it’s coming to the big screen with big name talent attached! According to the Hollywood Reporter, Chloe Grace Moretz, star of movies like Kick-Ass, 500 Days of Summer and Let Me In, will star as the titular Cameron Post, a gay girl growing up in Montana in the early ’90s who has her first love and then gets sent to a conversion therapy camp by her conservative aunt. Sasha Lane, from the recent film American Honey, will also star, playing Cameron’s best friend at the camp. Desiree Akhavan, the director of another queer movie, Appropriate Behavior, will direct, giving it even more of a queer female focus and, hopefully, a chance at being one of the better queer films of the lesbian movie canon.

This film is urgent; it’s set largely in a conversion therapy center and shows how intensely harmful those places are. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, as well as several people on Trump’s team, are big supporters of conversion therapy, where LGBTQ youth are tortured until they develop negative reactions to their attraction or gender and become “straight” or “cisgender.” Our country’s new leaders have pledged to work to overturn protections for LGTBTQ people across America. Hopefully the film will bring a spotlight to this incredibly serious issue that literally costs lives of LGBTQ youth.

Cameron Post author Emily M. Danforth agrees:

Not so long ago I was a closeted teen in cattle country queering every onscreen female pairing. This news is a dream https://t.co/wgAK2ijzOa

— emily danforth (who is never here) (@emdanforth) November 18, 2016

(Also, here's to advance tickets for Mike Pence and those many other politicians who support harmful, pro-conversion therapy legislation.)

— emily danforth (who is never here) (@emdanforth) November 18, 2016

The film also includes John Gallagher, Jr., Jennifer Ehle and Forrest Goodluck, who it seems might be playing a character who was Two Spirit (a gender identity in some American Indian cultures that’s not a part of the western gender binary) in the book, so it’ll be interesting to see if that part of the character is kept for the film. No casting has been announced for Coley Taylor, the rodeo queen that Cameron first falls in love with.

If you haven’t already read the book, now would be a great time.

It’s been a bleak couple of weeks, but this news coupled with the news that Gabby Rivera will be writing the new America Chavez comic book adds a little hope into our lives.

Autostraddle Book Club: Emily Answers Your “Cameron Post” Questions and We Throw A Feelings-Fest

Hello! Welcome to BOOK CLUB DAY! By now you’ve all completed, I hope, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Maybe you cried in line at the grocery store with one hand gripping your kindle and maybe you cried in your bed on a Saturday morning and maybe you didn’t cry at all while reading it but maybe you laughed a few times, or maybe both. Definitely if you read the same book I read, you closed it wishing it wasn’t over. You closed it wishing for a sequel or even more of the same.

I think the experiences in Cameron Post are familiar to so many queer women — the rural isolation from lesbian culture, the crush on the straight best friend, the religious relatives with prehistoric ideas about homosexuality — and already so many of you have told me how much you relate to Cameron and how her story connects with yours. That’s how I felt reading the book too, except backwards — it was you I thought of when I read this book, not me. If I was in this book, I wouldn’t be Cameron, I’d be Lindsey Lloyd (although that would’ve required substantially more confidence and self-awareness than I actually possessed as a teenager). I can relate to the tragic and sudden death of a parent, but outside of that I was looking at Cameron from the outside, maybe somewhere near where Lindsey or Margot were looking from.

I fell in love with Cameron and with this book pretty early on, just as I would’ve if I’d known her in real life. Because she has so many feelings and she’s trying so hard to figure everything out and isn’t afraid to dig and dig and dig until she gets it. I think that’s part of what makes queer women so awesome, eventually, is that we’re forced by design to develop a really strong relationship with ourselves. We’ve never just “fit right in,” and that experience of being slightly apart makes a person really develop into a brilliant, complicated thing.

So it is with great lovely excitement that I present to you this fantastic and totally epic Cameron Post Post, which contains answers to your questions. Everybody who sent a question for Emily was entered in our drawing to win a Lindsey Lloyd care package and on the last page of this Q&A we’ll tell you who got drawn via Carrie’s Magical Random Number Generator.

Emily Danforth answered 38 questions for you, so I recommend getting some tea, coffee or whiskey, maybe sitting on your couch, sharpening your fingertips, wiping off your eyeballs, and sitting down to read one of my favorite things we’ve ever put together for you here on this website. There’s lots to talk about, and we hope that you will — Emily’s got some questions for you in here and I have a lot in my head, like “what was your favorite part?” and “who broke your heart the most?” but those aren’t as interesting and complicated as what we’re about to get into.

So, without further ado, Emily pontificates on the coming-of-age-novel, the writing process, the book acceptance and publication process, word processing programs, queer politics in literature, lesbian pop culture, Dorothy Allison, Taco John’s… and the possibility of another book that picks up somewhere after Cameron Post left off. (!!!!!) Basically it’s the best treatment ever to Novel Withdrawal.

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I loved the balance of the authenticity of the dialog and interaction between the protagonist and her peers, and the heady, often heart-wrenching introspection from Cameron. How did you approach writing for an adolescent narrator without coming off as precocious?

Thanks very much for saying so, glad that all worked for you. For me it comes down to understanding how characterization works, in-scene, and then complementing/complicating that with strategic usage of POV in the passages of narration. Cam as storyteller is a bit older, and a bit wiser, a person, one with a more developed sense of perspective on the things she’s telling you about, than is Cam as character in scene, and I was always trying to remind myself of that and use it as a potential place for tension-building in the novel.

I see Cam, the person telling you, the reader, this story, as maybe a twenty or twenty-one year old, so she’s put some of this behind her, or worked it out, I suppose, in order to be able to now tell the story to you. But, I think her narration also reveals some of the ways in which she hasn’t yet processed all of these experiences as fully as she might pretend to, and, in fact, telling the story is helping her to do some of this processing. This is her “reflective distance” from her own past, and utilizing that distance, that slightly older, introspective voice, throughout the novel, was all pretty strategic.

“Sometimes when people ask me why I write, I tell them that it’s because I grew up gay (very gay) way out in the middle of cowboy country in the windswept and dusty badlands of eastern Montana.”

However, sometimes I had to mute that reflective voice when Cam was remembering a specific moment that would become a scene in the novel—or at least turn the volume way down on it—to better help you, as a reader, just be there in those moments with her. It’s a tricky negotiation and it doesn’t work the same for every scene in the book. Sometimes she’s doing quite a lot of narrative “interpreting” as she’s showing you this scene, other times she’s just painting the picture for you. Mostly it’s just honoring your characters, in this case, my main character, and trying to present her as wholly as possible, not to pander to a certain ideal of type, or to use her as a puppet serving my plot, but to attempt to honor Cam’s humanity on the page. That sounds sort of silly, maybe, but it’s as accurate a piece of my process as I can explain it.

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Where do you live now? How do your Montana roots impact your queer identity?

I live in Providence, Rhode Island—a city I love. We’ve only been here for a year and a half but both my wife and I are completely in love with Providence. It’s such a great, small, coastal city. I’ve always been really drawn to New England, for whatever reason (too many John Updike/John Irving novels…) and if we don’t live here forever, for always, it will likely still be somewhere coastal (the Pacific Northwest is very nice, too.) But, despite that, I think I’ll always consider myself a Montanan. All of my most formative years were spent there, and the whole of my immediate family still lives there—which means I’m back in MT at least once a year, often more than that. And I long for it, I do, when I’m away for too long—that landscapes works itself into your very being, I’m telling you, it haunts you until you return and get your fix. I wrote a little about this awhile ago, at least how growing up in Miles City affected me as a queer writer. Here’s how I put it then:

Sometimes when people ask me why I write, I tell them that it’s because I grew up gay (very gay) way out in the middle of cowboy country in the windswept and dusty badlands of eastern Montana. I don’t know that this answer is very satisfying to anyone. Sometimes people chuckle, uncertain. Sometimes they cock their heads, ask me to elaborate. Sometimes they just nod knowingly (you know how some people do that). What I think I mean by that answer, though, is that falling in love and in crush with other girls in Miles City, Mont. in the 1990s felt so fraught and, frankly, dangerous that from the ages of 8 to 18, closeted-me inhabited a very active and wholly imagined fantasy world in which a braver, not-closeted-me, was, well, braver and not closeted. All this time spent imagining other worlds, and other versions of me in those worlds, was eventually good fuel for fiction writing. But more than that, growing up this way — which is to say, growing up in the closet — kept me on the periphery of so many of the crucial rites of American adolescent passage: first dates and kisses and dances, those formative individual events, most of them small, to be sure, but you add them all up and there’s real weight there for those of us who missed out on all of them.

So, you know, there you go. All of that experience was formative for me, as a writer, as a queer, as a queer writer.

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How much of the book was based on research? Could you talk about any research that you did? What, if anything, was the book based on and what inspired it?

How did you go about researching the “conversion” school Cameron is sent to?

Much of the “treatment” focused on in the God’s Promise section comes from actual research I did. That research took many shapes and forms. I read all kinds of books from various practitioners of these therapies (and ordered materials directly from Exodus International, an organization that’s really changed its rhetoric in recent months, but that remains in its function as a referral network for many ex-gay ministries—despite that even they have now mostly parted ways with that term); I also spent hours and hours combing the websites and blogs of these ministries and practitioners, and also folks who themselves claim to be “ex-gay” or who have just spent time on the receiving end of conversion/reparative therapy, (And I had one on one conversations with many of these people, in chat-rooms or via email.)

I even got access to the offical application materials and “residence manual” for a live-in reparative facility for adults in Kansas. (The dorm manual in the middle of the novel is based on those materials.) I watched several documentaries on the topic, too, including the excellent One Nation Under God (1993—directed by Teodoro Maniaci, Francine Rzeznik and not to be confused with the 2009 film of the same name, also a documentary.) It was a particularly useful film, not only because it’s a documentary, but because it’s from roughly the same time period as the novel. Exodus International was just Exodus back then, or Exodus Ministries (no International component), and it has changed significantly, as well, between the time period covered in the novel and today, so only using recent resources just didn’t make sense given that Cam’s world is one from twenty years ago.

However, the facility itself, as built in the novel—God’s Promise–is an invention, it’s fiction—there is not specific school or facility that it’s based on. The practices that happen there, yes, but the place is my own, one born of my research.

As for inspiration, shoot, that’s impossible to answer, really. It’s inspired by so, so many things, from novels I’d read to music I love (or once loved) to films, my own memories, the landscape of Montana, growing up in the closet, being horrified by conversion therapy and its practitioners. I can’t pin any of that down to one satisfying answer. It was my first novel and it had been bubbling away inside me for a very long time, its points of inspiration are many.

Did you have someone like Lindsey Lloyd in your formative years? Or have you been that person to someone?  

I didn’t have a Lindsey Lloyd type figure in my life until college, sad to say, and by then I was old enough, had experienced enough, that she didn’t have quite the same effect on me as she did on Cam—or as she would have on me had I met her at 12 or 13, or even 14 or 15. But, still—there were a couple of friends who I met early on in college who introduced me to some aspects of dyke culture that I was unfamiliar with, absolutely. My best “fairy gay,” though, was/is my friend Ben. We also met in college. I was already out and he’s no lesbian, but we did proclaim ourselves the school’s “favorite gays,” and then worked really hard to live up to that self-bestowed title, mostly by throwing lots of parties. If it sounds like gross behavior it might have been, I’m afraid, but we simply did not care. (Mostly because we were drunk.)

I would have LOVED to have had a Lindsey Lloyd in my life in high school, despite some of her (delightful) flaws. A Lindsey in high school would have saved me some heartache, I’m sure. I don’t know that I’ve specifically been a lesbian fairy godmother to anyone, the “keeper of the light of dyke knowledge,” I mean, but I did spend a chunk of my early twenties as a kind of Lindsey Lloyd. I see a lot of my 19, 20, 21 year-old self in that character. That’s not an entirely good thing, maybe, but it’s true.

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As a queer writer, do you consider your work necessarily political? Would you ever write a book that didn’t focus on queer issues, or do you feel as though part of your mission/responsibility/identity as a writer is wrapped up in being queer?

Certainly I’m used to my sexuality as being understood, by many, as political—that’s just part of any out queer’s current experience. (It’s not, frankly, fundamentally understood by me that way, but I live in a culture and at a time wherein any non- heteronormative desire or embodiment is necessarily political. The very recent election and the great successes for marriage equality (and queer representation in congress) indicate a real kind of progress in terms of shifting political views, nationally, on issues that pertain to lesbians and gays, but it’s also one that’s easy to problematize given all that’s bound up, politically, in the institution of marriage, no matter the gender of those getting married—but it’s social progress nonetheless and I appreciate it as such.)

All of this is to say that heteronormativity makes any exploration of queer desire in a work of fiction political for some readers, while at the same time some explorations/representations feel not nearly political or politicized enough for other readers (often, unsurprisingly, queer readers.) One of the things I’m most interested in exploring when I write fiction is desire—romantic, sexual, even aesthetic. Desire is so often messy and complicated, even fraught—it’s good material for fiction. And what I know best is queer desire, so I’ll always, always be writing about that. Guaranteed.

I wanted it to be a great big coming of GAYge novel, one that both represented the literary traditions/tropes of the American coming-of-age novel and also one that queered some of those traditions, or answered back to them, subverted them.

I wanted Miseducation to be a great big coming-of-GAYge novel, one that both represented the literary traditions/tropes of the American coming-of-age novel/novel of development, and also one that queered some of those traditions, or answered back to them, subverted them. As such, it necessarily explores the formation of queer identity(ies) in a fairly microscopic and chronologic way. I’ve now written this novel, though, and I’ll never write it again. (Unless, I suppose, I ever write Cam’s continuing adventures, which would be its own novel, but would tread in similar territory.) What I mean is: I won’t again write a novel that’s structured as a coming-of-age novel, a novel that explores queerness in quite this way. It’s always been important to me that each successive novel I write take a new approach in terms of structure, in terms of construction (and of course in terms of plot and content), though undoubtedly some themes I’ll return to again and again. However, I’m writer that deals in specifics.

Like Dorothy Allison, I want my fiction to “break down small categories,” to feel authentic and powerful in the specificity of its rendering. Allison also said “some things must be felt to be understood, that despair, for example, can never be adequately analyzed; it must be lived…”

She’s talking, of course, about the power of literature to transport readers not only to different times and places, but to different selves, to emotional landscapes that cannot be effectively discussed in, say, academic speak—and that’s a power that I seek to utilize in my own fiction. Audre Lorde famously wrote, “There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself – whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. – because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.” I believe that one of the powerful things character-driven fiction can do is offer narratives that refuse those kinds of dismissals, that kind of essentialism.

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In the novel, many characters are presented sympathetically and multi-dimensionally, including those who are using religion as an excuse for intolerance. Was it difficult to create those characters who were prejudiced?

This was something that was pretty crucial to me as I wrote—getting these characters to feel multidimensional on the page. Aunt Ruth, for instance, was a character who went through substantial revision as the drafts piled up, and I’m still not sure she’s as complicated/compelling as I’d ultimately like for her to be. I absolutely did not want the evangelical Christian characters in this novel—even those running God’s Promise—to be merely zealot-puppets that I could manipulate in scene to reveal my own views and agenda.

However, some readers of early drafts called me out for writing caricatures and not characters, and I think those criticisms were pretty fair. No surprise that it’s challenging to authentically and fairly treat characters (on the page) who espouse viewpoints and live ideologies that you so vehemently disagree with. I revised several scenes because I kept making those characters, in my novel, too one- dimensional and cartoonish. (The problem being that it’s hard for me not to experience most zealots, in life, as cartoons, even as I see them in front of me on TV or on the street—my way of looking at and experiencing the world is just so removed from any of that—so it was a personal challenge to try and move beyond that kind of portrayal in my novel.)

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How did you develop your prose style?  Were there any writers who were particularly influential of your style? 

I developed it by reading a whole lot and writing a whole lot, and, importantly, thinking pretty critically about craft, but then also purposefully not thinking much about it, frankly, when I sit down to do early drafting. I can think more strategically about technique when I’m revising, but in its early stages my fiction doesn’t come from craft, it comes from ideas or memories, from small moments of this or that—the nostalgic potential of a particular smell, a bit of conversation I’ve overheard, some grievance or terror or piece of a tragedy—that I want to “get at” in fiction. I studied fiction, as a craft, in a couple of graduate programs and unquestionably all of that careful attention paid to fiction—and the workshopping process—helped me to refine my style. (Though if I look at pieces of my writing from my late teens, early twenties, that style—some of my preferred usages of technique, that is, my stylistic tics, are already emerging.)

There are many, many writers who have influenced me, though I don’t know that it would be correct to say that they’ve influenced my style, in specific. In particular I’m drawn to Steinbeck’s ability to render place; to Sarah Waters’ colorful treatment of history and her always delicious plots; to Nabakov’s sentences; to Roald Dahl’s wit and villains; to Flannery O’Connor’s southern Gothicism and penchant for (grotesque) violence—particularly in her short fiction.

Before writing Miseducation… I really steeped myself in (mostly late-twentieth century) coming-of-age novels, and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander; Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone; Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex; and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep were all equally influential. (As were books from much earlier in the century, or even before, including Catcher in the Rye, Rubyfruit Jungle, and Susan Warner’s sentimental “classic” novel of instruction, The Wide, Wide World.) If I could pick one novel, though, that I wish I’d written, that I wish I could claim, it would absolutely be Michael Cunnigham’s The Hours. I think it’s pretty much a perfect novel.

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If Cameron was losing it for Coley in 2012, what movie-of-seduction would she bring to the apartment that fateful afternoon? Still The Hunger, or has the cinema of the last twenty years made a new offering?

Ha!–fun question. Unquestionably there are now more (and better) films with some sort of Sapphic bent for Cam to choose from than there were in 1991. And TV shows and webisodes too, for that matter. It’s all a question of perspective and intent, I think. The Hunger works well for Cam in her particular situation because she has it on hand, for one, and saves time skipping a stop at the video store before heading to Coley’s, but also because while of course she knows there’s going to be some ladies making out in it, she can present it to Coley as just a “wacky vampire story.” And then she gets to enjoy the moments in between, once she’s pressed play, while Coley figures out the other layer to this film—the one that Cam hasn’t mentioned. (Also, it was historically appropriate for my needs as a novelist.)

All of this would necessarily play out quite differently today, given how much more visible (and accessible) are various kinds of LGBTQ representations in our current popular culture—as problematic as some of those representations might be for some of us. I belabor this because Cam’s choice is in some ways made easier—there’s more material to choose from—and also more difficult, for that very same reason. Would she want to pick something that she still thinks Coley wouldn’t be familiar with? So maybe an indie movie? And does she go for a true romance between women, or is just a sex scene between women enough? I mean, if she wanted to hit the nail squarely on the head then it’s, what, an episode of The L Word? (Or now The Real L Word.) That just seems too on the nose to me. She’d probably go for something wherein a seemingly straight woman falls for another woman, but also something that doesn’t feel too complicated or demanding of its viewers, and features youngish protagonists. Maybe D.E.B.S. or Kissing Jessica Stein (but skipping the awful last five minutes of that film, just ending it early, when they’re a happy, functioning couple dancing around to music) or Saving Face. But I’m a Cheerleader or Imagine Me and You might work, too.

Or Bound. When in doubt there’s always Bound, right? It might be perfect for Cam’s intentions, actually, because there’s this complicated crime plot to latch on to, so she could easily present it to Coley “just” as a mob film. Or she could always cherry pick a couple of the Willow/Tara episodes of Buffy. Or just pull up one of the 900 clip reels of lesbian moments in film on youtube (though where’s the fun in that?) One of my very, very favorite films exploring young, fraught, imperfect romance between teenage girls is Lukas Moodysson’s quiet Swedish film Fucking Åmål (which was released in the states as Show Me Love.) That might, in fact, be the absolute perfect choice (though they’d have to contend with the subtitles, which could make following the narrative tricky if they’re simultaneously trying to make out. I’m sure Coley and Cam could figure it out, though.)

So, final answer: Fucking Åmål. If you haven’t seen it you should, it’s incredibly tenderhearted and touching and honest.

This is somewhat embarrassing to admit (and I’m sure you weren’t expecting this follow up when you asked the question), but on one of my very first official dates with the woman who would become my wife—I say official because we’d been friends who had not dated for several years prior—we watched “The Puppy Episode” of Ellen. Anyway, get this, a friend of mine had taped this episode for us—off of the Lifetime network, of all places—because I didn’t have a TV (let alone a VCR) in my dorm room. I was a closeted high school kid when the series was on the air, and so had not tuned in, nor had my wife (though I’d seen “The Puppy Episode” by the time we watched it together on this date), but this very good friend made me two VHS tapes of the final two seasons as a kind of “welcome to your gay life” present, I guess. I still have those tapes, actually. (Despite that I have no longer have a VCR on which to play them.) Anyway, I love the image of the two of us on our first date, sitting on this twin mattress in somebody’s dorm room watching Ellen come out: it’s such a cliché. You’d think we’d have headed to an Indigo Girls concert immediately afterward. (We did not.) I don’t think, however, that I intended it as a potential tool of seduction. I just thought it was funny and that we’d like it (and we did.) I think we might have held hands while watching it. That’s how sweet we once were.

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NEXT: On Religion-by-VHS, writing software, the autobiographical elements of the book, Coley Taylor’s sexuality and more!

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Autostraddle Book Club #6: The “Cameron Post” 90s Dyke Care Package Giveaway Is Here

We’re merely one week away from our big conversation about this month’s Read a F-cking Book Club selection, The Miseducation of Cameron Post by emily m. danforth, which means it’s giveaway time!

Hopefully you’ve plowed through most or all of the book by now and are probably bursting at the seams with questions for emily, who will be taking your questions, because she’s awesome!

So, here’s how the giveaway is gonna work:

• You’re gonna email autostraddlemoderators [at] gmail [dot] com with your question for Emily by Sunday night, November 4.
• Everybody who submits a question will be entered in the drawing to win a Lindsey Lloyd care package!
• On November 8th when we have our discussion, we’ll announce the winner of the drawing, and emily will mail you your special package!

As you probably already know, Lindsey Lloyd is Cameron Post’s fairy dykemother from Seattle who travels to Miles City, Montana, for swimming in the summers. But when Lindsey returns home for school and Cameron returns to her dyke-free life of lusting after straight girls in Miles City, Lindsey takes it upon herself to brief Cameron on everything she’s missing via Postal Mail. This means Bikini Kill heavy mix tapes, old issues of The Advocate and cheeky postcards like this one:

 “True to her word, even before midterms Lindsey had already sent me maybe twenty handwritten notebook pages filled with her observations and current love interests, alway sin sparkly pen, as well as a busted-up copy of Rubyfruit Jungle, a couple of random issues of The Advocate, and maybe a dozen mix tapes with each song written in a different color on the cardboard liner inside. Everything but the tapes I hid under my mattress, which is what I knew that teenage boys did with their porn-mag stashes. The tapes I wore threadbare on my Walkman during cross-country practices.”

emily sent us pictures of the giveaway care package so here’s a sneak peak!

Seriously this is the best giveaway ever. Okay, you know the rules!

Autostraddle Book Club #6: We’re Reading “The Miseducation of Cameron Post”

“Dead parents. Random acts of shoplifting. Girls kissing girls in barns, in twisty slides on playgrounds, in abandoned hospitals. A Victorian dollhouse with all kinds of weird shit glued to it. The compulsive renting and watching of 99cent videos. Miles City, Montana. The 1990s. Swimming. Summer. Cowgirls. Dinosaur discovering. Ferris Wheels. Conversion therapy. Taco Johns. A girl named Jane Fonda and the hollowed compartment in her prosthetic leg. The way a mountain-toppling earthquake that happened some thirty years before keeps aftershocking our hero: Cameron Post. Yup: it’s coming of age, it’s coming of GAYge, it’s a Bildungsroman, a novel of development, it’s all of these things, none of these things, and it would be kick-ass if you gave it a whirl.”

I didn’t read the back of the book or the book flap or anything, I just opened the book and started reading it. It was that part of a flight where you can’t use any electronic devices and I had The Miseducation of Cameron Post because it’s this new incredible lesbian YA novel I’ve heard good things about. Nothing specific, just good things in general. I mean Nancy Garden — Annie On My Mind Nancy Garden — said it was “one of the best and most honest portraits of a young lesbian I’ve read in years” and asserted that “this is a story that keeps you reading way into the night — an absorbing, suspenseful and important book.” Nancy Garden, you guys!

Then it was the part of the flight where I was supposed to be getting really upset that we were still sitting on the tarmac and I was gonna miss my connection in Atlanta, but instead I was reading this book. Then it was the part where I was invited to whip out my kindle or laptop, and instead I kept reading this book. I just barely made my connecting flight, by the way, but I made it, and then when I got to Ohio I stayed up ’til 5 AM reading this book. “Way into the night,” just like Nancy. Nancy isn’t alone in her affection for this book— as cited on danforth’s website, Cameron Post “received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal, and was praised in the LA Times, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Stranger, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and NPR, whose reviewer called it “a skillfully and beautifully written story that does what the best books do: It shows us ourselves in the lives of others.”

Reading it just made me feel like I was at home, moreso than any lesbian novel I’ve read before or since, and the closest I’ve felt to any novel since The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It takes place in Montana, mostly in the 90s, and stars Cameron Post, a bright funny budding lesbian whose parents die in a car accident the same day she kisses a girl for the first time.

Speaking of first times, I want to read this book again for the first time — but I can’t. So instead, I’m gonna have y’all read it and then live vicariously through your feelings about the book!

Which is why I am officially announcing that the next selection for the Autostraddle Read a Fucking Book Club is Emily M. Danforth’s “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” and I am 86 kinds of excited for this.

So, here’s how this is gonna work:

1) Get the Book!

If you purchase the book via amazon, Autostraddle gets a kickback, which’s lovely and makes everybody happy. Overseas? Purchase the book via The Book Depository and Autostraddle will get a kickback, which ALSO makes everybody happy!

(If you’d rather purchase it in a brick-and-mortar bookshop though, we encourage you to patronize your local independent bookshops if you have one nearby!)

Pro tip: if the physical book is too pricey for you and it’s not at the library, you can download a free app that enables you to read the less-expensive kindle version on your computer.

2) Read The Book and Think About Questions for Emily!

This time book club’s gonna be super-special because emily m. danforth herself will be participating in Read A F-cking Book Club! Yup!

So, as you’re reading, if there are any questions you’d like to ask emily, write them down, ’cause we’ll be collecting them from you in November and that’ll be a way to enter the Cameron Post Giveaway Contest we’ll conduct on November 1st. This giveaway will include a Lindsey Lloyd care package like the kind she sends to Cameron in the book (which will include a Lindsey Lloyd mixtape, obvs), and you will understand precisely how kickass that is when you read the book.

3) Finish Reading the Book!

On November 8th, it’ll be time to talk about Cameron Post together as a family. Be prepared.