"Forbidden Love"
                        A film review by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister
                      on "The Women's Show"
                    WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                         October 9, 1993

    The 4th Annual Tampa Bay Pride Film Festival is now in its
final weekend at the Tampa Theater and environs and the weekend
is filled with films you'll want to see as well as concerts and
live entertainment and a dance on Sunday evening.  Tonight at
7:30 Quentin Crisp will be an honored guest, introducing a film
about him called "Resident Alien."

    At 10:00 tonight will be another in this year's bumper crop
of fine lesbian history documentaries, "Forbidden Love: The
Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives."   Earlier in the week we had
Paris Poirer's cinema verite "Last Call at Maud's" and Barbara
Hammer's "Nitrate Kisses."  Now we move on to a production of the
National Film Board of Canada's feminist Studio D, that looks at
material somewhat similar to that in "Maud's"--lesbian history in
the 1950s and 1960s--but these filmmakers had access to more
resources and were able to take a somewhat more ambitious
approach.  So they come at the material very differently and with
a wonderfully campy sense of humor.    In "Forbidden Love"
writer/directors Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie have created a
hybrid genre constructed around the pulp lesbian paperback novels
of the 1950s and 1960s, those potboilers filled with torturous,
forbidden love that, for the most part, led to punishment or
death for the lovers.  The film begins and periodically returns
to, a dramatization of just this sort of novel.  Small town Laura
is taking the train to the big city after the young woman she
loves has retreated in fear to the arms and protection of her
stalwart boyfriend.  Laura begs her, in vain, to come with her.
This gives 1993 audiences an idea of what these highly
exaggerated and stereotypical stories were like; each sequence of
the drama, intercut throughout the film, ends with a fade into a
still of the way the scene would have appeared on the cover of
one of these lurid novels that had titles like  "Girls'
Dormitory," "Lesbians in Black Lace," "The Third Sex,"
"Manhater," "Women of Evil."

   The conceit of using dramatized sequences and many shots of
the provocative covers of these paperbacks is only the framework
for the heart of the film, namely interviews with nine Canadian
lesbians and U.S. lesbian novelist Ann Bannon about their
experiences of coming out and living as a lesbian in those years
when theirs was "a love that dare not speak its name."  Their
stories highlight both the extent to which the reality of their
existence differed from that of the "twilight girls" of the
fiction, and the extent to which their own notions of "the life"
was first colored by their reading of these novels.  For many of
these women, the first they ever knew about love among women came
from reading these books, and even though the books were largely
cautionary tales about what a terrible fate awaited you if you
were to become a lesbian, at least they served the purpose of
letting it be known that there were such women.  To perhaps
thousands of isolated women in small towns across the continent
this was important and welcome news.  Of course, the notions of
what lesbians were like that they formed from these
representations were pretty weird.  One woman in the filmtells
of taking a trip to Greenwich Village to meet the lesbians; she
imagined it to be a bucolic little town with picket fences
inhabited by women dressed in distinctive butch/femme attire.
She and her friend spent the whole weekend there and never once
found anyone they recognized as a lesbian.

   "Forbidden Love" gives us a lot of information on the white
working-class, butch/femme bar scene in Canadian cities during
the period before middle-class lesbian feminists appeared;
most of these earlier establishments were in seedy neighborhoods
and frequently featured fights among the butches over femmes and
raids by the police.  One Native American woman in the film talks
about the racism in such bars and how she felt more at home in
the Black lesbian establishments than in these white bars.

   The film ends, as it began, with a final chapter of the story
of Laura in the big wicked city.  She has been picked up in a
lesbian bar by Mitch, an experienced woman, who plies her with
creme de menthe and takes her home.  What fate awaits her in this
woman's apartment?  I'll never tell.  You'll just have to come to
the screening tonight at the Tampa Theater or Sunday morning at
10:00 in the Video Cabaret to find out (or buy the video when it
comes out).

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister
on Women and Film.

   Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.