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Surfing with the Curl Girls

Erin stands in her living room and flashes a sly smile as she racks her shotgun and demonstrates how scary it sounds-hopefully enough so to preclude her from ever having to fire the weapon, she says. The pretty 27-year-old boasts about the conceal-and-carry permit she’s allowed as a prosecutor for the California State Attorney General’s Office.

But regardless of her self-professed talent with firearms or women, Erin certainly has a way with a surfboard.

Like her closest friends, Erin spends all of her free time chasing waves along the Southern California coastline. And Curl Girls, a documentary currently airing on Logo, tags along with this “group of Los Angeles lesbian surfers whose main passions are surfing and each other.” The hour-long special offers a glimpse at a few weeks in the lives of this rambunctious pack, tracking their antics both in and out of the Pacific Ocean.

The action zigzags between surfing shots and snippets of on-screen interviews with the women. The music pulsates, the images flicker, and somehow you surrender to the fun not because it’s irresistible, but because the case for it is so overstated that it wearsyou down.

Curl Girls is part music video and part surf porn, although you don’t have to be a wave chaser to enjoy watching the cascading curls. And the girls themselves are attractive and engaging subjects who are at ease in front of the cameras. It’s not often that you get to see women surfers on screen, and the fact that these women are queer makes them all the more intriguing.

The program is shot MTV-style, which should come as no surprise given that Logo is a division of MTV Networks. This could almost be The Real World-except that the production isn’t as obnoxiously slick, the psychodrama is comparatively minimal, and rather than sporting a token lesbian/bi woman, here the entire troupe is gay.

Besides Erin the cast of characters includes Michelle, a veterinarian; Beth, 28, a former pro-football player from San Francisco who moved to LA to work for a nonprofit; Vanessa, 32, who used to be a skater but currently waits tables while going to fashion school to make “pimp suits” and “really cool tailored suits for women;” Viv, 36, who is rarely heard from beyond the introductory sequence; and the equally short-shrifted Emily, 26, who gets no screen time other than when she is trying on bikinis at a local surf shop.

The shop is Rocker board shop, an outfit near Venice beach that caters to women surfers. When the girls hit the shop, co-owners Christina and Alison let them know that they’ll be combing the beach over the next several weeks in search of an athlete to represent them. The top candidate gets a chance to compete under the Rocker name, in Rocker gear and on a custom-shaped board. The search for a winner is the central focus of the program, but it boils down to a contest between just two of the women rather than a collective scramble for the single spot.

What ties this group of women together is their love for a particular sport, but, let’s face it?they’re lesbians and they’re connected to each other in more ways than one. They’re current flames and former lovers, longtime buddies and constant rivals. The only non-surfer in the bunch is Jess, who got married to Beth when the mayor of San Francisco was first handing out licenses to same-sex couples.

Although the central drama revolves around who will win the spot on Team Rocker, Jess and Beth’s teetering relationship is the show’s main source for Dyke Drama. They squabble and they make goo-goo eyes, they waffle and recommit. Who knows where they’ll end up, and who really cares? Other running narratives include Michelle’s desire to be more than friends with ex-girlfriend Erin, and Erin’s attempts to woo a woman at work.

This may be fluffy fare, but these women do challenge stereotypes of surfers and of lesbians in ways that should reach a broader audience, so it’s unfortunate that the show

is airing only in the gayborhood of cable TV. It’s refreshing to see lesbian athletes in sports other than the usual suspects, especially a sport that is so underrepresented in film and TV.

Curl Girls also offers a rare chance to see women surfers who are more than just Gidgets adorning the beach.

It’s not as if these women never come across as caricatures: When Christina tells Vanessa she hopes to see her at the beach over the next couple of weeks, the latter responds with a “fer sher, fer sher” that could out-Spicoli the icon himself. And during an evening hanging out and trading tales of their first lesbian encounters, more than a few of the women reveal a clueless streak when it comes to women who identify as bisexual. The surfer speak might be tongue-in-cheek, but the biphobia unfortunately isn’t.

Perhaps the biggest drawback with Curl Girls is that it sets viewers up for some false expectations.

The opening scenes, for instance, suggest that the cameras will roam amongst the various players and explore how their lives intersect and diverge. In reality, the program focuses on just a handful of the women while giving very little screen time to other members of the group. Who knows the reasons behind the disparity, but the two women who are featured the least happen to both be Asian, and the group is mostly white.

Another perplexity: It seems as if the show was originally intended as a series and was only made into a “special” after the fact. Maybe we’re just so used to seeing reality shows as series, but it doesn’t help that the direction of the program sometimes seems aimless and the conclusion isn’t especially satisfying.

But as long as you go into this expecting little more than some mindless entertainment for roughly an hour, it’s unlikely that you’ll be disappointed. You’ll probably even have a good time.

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