Last Saturday night, while I was forgetting to record Tina Fey
on SNL, a friend of mine excitedly told me that she’s finally going to see the movie Personal Best when it airs on Logo (AfterEllen.com’s parent company) Wednesday morning. My friend has seen plenty of lesbian movies – we’ve seen about a zillion together – but this one is rarely on TV and was only recently released on DVD, so she’s never managed to see it. And there are a number of reasons to see
Personal Best. It’s Mariel Hemingway‘s first lesbian role – and, for a straight woman, she’s played a lot of lesbian roles. It’s also a great sports movie, and provides an interesting glimpse back at the Olympic Trials gearing up to the 1980 Summer Olympics. But most important, it was a watershed lesbian/bisexual movie. For many of us who were first struggling to come out in the ’80s, it was the only mainstream lesbian or bisexual movie on our radar.
Although I plan to record it on Wednesday, I’ve already seen Personal Best. In fact, I’ve seen it several times, but I certainly recall the first. (And my poor mother probably recalls it, too.) It was 1986. I was 17, intensely drawn to all things lesbian and desperately trying to convince myself that this fixation didn’t mean anything significant. (Turns out, it did.) I was determined to watch Personal Best when I saw it listed, but due to the, um, adult-oriented channel that it was on and the specifics of when I would watch, I could not be as discreet as I would have liked. So I gave my mother some long-forgotten, probably really stupid and transparent reason for wanting to see it, and I watched. And my liberal mother, who already feared that I would tell her the things I told her a few years later, did not try to prevent me. But she was clearly not happy about it. And that is the story of my first lesbian movie.
The other ’80s lesbian movie that was important to many lesbians my age was, of course, Desert Hearts. I surreptitiously rented this one while home from college and, this time, I knew exactly why I wanted to watch it. And I didn’t want anyone to know I was watching it. So I hid it, watched when no one else was home, watched one scene several more times, and then hid the movie and returned it when no one was looking.
But as important as both of these movies were to my nascent lesbian self-awareness, I experienced my most important lesbian movie moment in a non-lesbian movie, Bright Lights, Big City. A few months before furtively watching Desert Hearts, I was at the movies, holding hands with the guy I was dating, watching Michael J. Fox snort lines of coke with a couple of girls at a club – when my spidey-sense began to tingle. Fox’s character went searching for his new acquaintances, barged in on them kissing in a bathroom stall and, BAM, I was alert. And really, really aware that I did not want to be holding hands with the boy sitting next to me. (I didn’t really want to make out with coked-up girls in bathroom stalls, either … but that was certainly closer to what I wanted.) I didn’t come out because of Bright Lights, but that moment, coupled with a handful of other epiphanies, led me to come out a few months later.
And that is my ramble down memory lane. There were many more lesbian movies and lesbian movie moments in subsequent years, but none were quite as poignant or tortured or memorable as the first.
So, if you have access to the Logo channel and have never seen Personal Best, check it out at 8:30 Wednesday morning. And in the meantime, what were your important lesbian movies and lesbian movie moments?
