Until recently, sapphic romances generally meant furtive nods in a corset. Today’s queer offerings are fun, unbuttoned – and climate-appropriate
There’s a scene towards the end of Rose Glass’s romance thriller Love Lies Bleeding in which the leads, Lou (Kristen Stewart) and Jackie (Katy M O’Brian), have a screaming match on a tennis court. “I wish I never met you!” shrieks Jackie, blasting bullets into the sky. Two minutes later they’re embracing. “What’s wrong with me?” she asks. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you,” Lou whispers to her murderous girlfriend, greased hair framing her face, bomber jacket slung around both shoulders.
To the lesbian eye this is pure dyke camp.
In Love Lies Bleeding, the sapphic gaze is everywhere. It’s there in the cigarette dangling from Stewart’s mouth as she cracks open an egg for her lover. It’s in the cut-off shirts and scuffed trainers and soft skin and taut muscle. It’s there when Jackie asks “I was maybe going to ask if I could crash here for a couple nights?” after meeting one time. This is a film that feels as though it was made for queers, not just about them. At one point, Lou flicks through Macho Sluts, Pat Califia’s 1988 book of erotic short stories. The first thing she saves when running from her home is her cat. Even the steroid injections feel like a queer act; the act of altering the body, a disregard for straight conventions.
But Glass’s movie doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Over the past year or so, the sapphic gaze has permeated the cinema in a major – and radical – new way. Take Drive-Away Dolls, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s nonsensical lesbian road movie. Or Bottoms, Emma Seligman’s high school buddy comedy about two lesbians trying to get laid. Or Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley’s neon-tinted vision about a lesbian PE teacher in the late 1980s, the era of Section 28. These aren’t just films about lesbians, like a queer safari that’ll appeal to everyone. These films place queers at their centre, and invite others to follow without watering anything down for taste. “What would I say?” says Ayo Edebiri as Josie in Bottoms about a girl she fancies. “How’s your boyfriend? How’s his penis?”
This isn’t sapphic film’s first rodeo in the mainstream. In the 2010s, lesbian films were definitely having a moment. After the mammoth success of Todd Haynes’ Carol in 2015, itself following Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour in 2013, others followed suit: The Handmaiden (2016), Disobedience (2017), The Favourite (2018), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Ammonite (2020). Brilliant, exciting, sexy films about women falling in love and having stolen kisses and spitting into each other’s mouths. But many of these films were also tragic, serious, bleak period pieces, in which women were fighting for their love against the odds – often with cataclysmic consequences.
This new wave is a lot less moralistic, a lot less tragic and a lot sillier in general. Because lesbians don’t just go around giving each other pained furtive glances, hiding their sexuality like a sordid secret. We can also be amoral, and shameless, and make horny jokes about dildos. In Bottoms, the two main characters aren’t particularly bothered about their sexuality – apart from the fact that it’s preventing them from getting laid because they can’t tell which girls would go down on them. In Drive-Away Dolls, Margaret Qualley’s Jamie is a “fuckboy” who sees no problem in kicking her best friend out of the motel room so that she can shag. This is a far cry from the corset-tight films of earlier years, in which our sapphic characters often find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It makes sense that this new sapphic wave would happen now, in the 2020s, when conversations about representation are starting to feel tired and hackneyed. When nearly a third of American Gen Z adults now identify as LGBTQ+, and since the proportion of people identifying as straight in the UK has steadily declined, it is no longer enough just to see lesbians or queer women on screen. We want to see all versions of queerness, in the same way that we’ve always seen all versions of straightness, in movies for us, not just about us. (It’s worth noting that Love Lies Bleeding, Bottoms and Blue Jean are from queer women directors, and Drive-Away Dolls was co-written by a queer woman).
Some people might struggle to appreciate Love Lies Bleeding. They won’t get the appeal of Lou wishing to chomp down on Jackie’s toes, or the satisfying thwack of moving aside a man who’s trying to invade your queer date. They won’t get Love Lies Bleeding in the same way that I didn’t get Oppenheimer (men talking about bombs), or any of the Bond films. But that’s the joy of the movies. We get to swap gazes, embody characters, try their versions of the world. And in Love Lies Bleeding, their version of the world was – deliciously, fantastically, hilariously – also my own.
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