Lend me a labrys and the spirit of (Alex Kingston as) Boudica, and off I would go to…I don’t know, threaten a Netflix executive? Have a chat with Madeleine Olnek because Wild Nights was deceptively earnest and I wanted Emily Dickinson to live forever? But this fantasy relies on the empathy of major studios and distributors, who are never going to solve The Problem with Lesbian Cinema when they don’t even properly market what they do make. In this alternate reality, “Where are my lesbians?!” is an appropriately anguished battle cry. With each list of the same five to ten films papering over our history, I feel like I’m living in a barren timeline utterly divorced from the world of weird and wonderful lesbian film that already exists. If you believed all the Oscar season thinkpieces, you would imagine that Carol, Ammonite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, World to Come, The Favourite, Wild Nights with Emily, Vita and Virginia and Colette are all we have. And when focusing on more recent offerings, there’s a general malaise over the prominence of a certain white, outmoded genre. Over the past few years especially, mainstream critical conversations around lesbian themes paint a generalized, dreary canon devoid of competent, queer-eyed directors within reach of even a lesbian pulp adaptation-up until a certain blonde in a fur coat circa 2015. For psychically toxic reasons, the history of queer women’s cinema is periodically undercut.
