The Bluegown Blog

A long, long time ago (as someone somewhere once said), when I first began to dabble in lesbian fiction, I thought it a good idea to seek out other works that had dealt with the same subject; to accumulate a library of what was then termed 'Clit Lit' (honest). My list ranged from Rita Mae Brown to Radclyffe Hall, but one target that eluded me was le Fanu's Carmilla - the lesbian-tinged vampire classic that not only influenced Dracula, but also an entire sub-genre of vampire movies, beginning with Hammer's The Vampire Lovers. Fast-forward some thirty-five years, and what should I find in a charity shop but the story collection In a Glass Darkly, of which Carmilla is one part. Seldom was fifty pence so willingly and productively spent.

*Okay, who's up on their Indigo Girls references?

Some years ago, when I first started getting heavily into anime, I drew up a list of the titles I was most keen to acquire. Strawberry Panic was at no.2 on that list. It took a while: Panic has never been released in the UK; was not available on the Grey Market; and second-hand copies in the US were prohibitively expensive. The version I eventually obtained appears to be a US pirate (though I didn't know this at the time) - not ideal, but it did finally enable me to watch the series. So, what did I think?

[Note: this is as close as I am likely to come to a repost, since Small Favors has already been featured on this blog, as the first entry in the series ‘My Porno Collection’. However, its claim to this category is too strong to ignore, so I hope you’ll forgive an expanded consideration that is, hopefully, a bit different]

There are those who, even in this day and age, maintain that pornography is the most destructive of all art forms. There is something about the explicit depiction of sex that activates the inner Puritan in almost all of us. Even people – such as myself – who actively consume porn have strict limits as to what we find unacceptable, and there is inevitably a certain amount of guilt in our enjoyment, however broad-minded we perceive ourselves to be. Quite why this should be so is a discussion beyond the scope of a blog post like this (indeed, it could fill several volumes), but the fact remains that, despite porn’s agonisingly slow drift towards the ‘mainstream’, it is still viewed with contempt and hostility by those who claim to know what’s good for us.

Written and directed by Mary Donoghue (responsible for the ultra-weepy Beaches), Jenny’s Wedding is a very late entry in the lesbian rom-com/drama cycle that included such fine films as Imagine Me & You, Nina’s Heavenly Delights and The Kids are All Right (all q.v.). Sadly, it has neither the wit nor the emotional heft of its illustrious predecessors.

As a rule, I tend to avoid what might be termed the political strand of gay film-making. Primarily, my concern is that polemic tends not to make for good entertainment (movies as divergent as Farenheit 9/11 and Triumph of the Will are flawed for precisely the same reasons). Also, I tend to get a throbbing pain in my temples whenever people start throwing terms like 'Queer Theory' and 'Feminist Anthropology' in my direction. But for every rule there are happy exceptions, and one such is Freeheld, a 'political' movie that works.