Imagining The Sky Beyond the Clouds: What If Queer / Lesbian Media Foreshadowed Our Wildest Dreams for the Future?
“Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us…When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets — no matter the medium — who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing.” — Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Out of all the tools and practices I could use to re-center and ground myself in the wake of powerful and triggering conversations, dealing with seasonal depression, or despair at the state of the world — I find a special medicine in watching movies and TV shows that feature love stories with queer and lesbian women. There’s something healing in the smiles that come to my face when watching queer women find, connect, and love on each other, particularly on the days when I find myself wondering: do queer trans women like me get to be safe, live free from violence, and find love, too?
Recently, I spent part of a morning & early afternoon talking with another queer femme about the Aziz Ansari story and the heartbreaking narratives & responses in its wake, about our own experiences around sexual harm & assault. Not long after, I found myself checked out, distracted, and unable to focus; so I walked out to sit on my front porch with a cup of coffee so I could feel multiple sensations at once — the warmth of the sun on my face, the crisp chill in the wind and the cold of the metal chair, two hands warming up on a hot mug — to bring myself back into my body. It mostly helped, but not all the way. The coffee in the cup finished, I walked back inside and decided to find a new lesbian movie I hadn’t seen yet, kicking off a mini lesbian movie marathon that bled into the following morning.
That night, before I went to bed, I started thinking about a trend I was seeing in some movies (examples: Heartland, Lovesong, AWOL, Boy Meets Girl) that center queer women / lesbians where the romances end: there’s either too many messy or complicated dynamics, a lack of communication, one of the women dies, or one or both of them end up choosing to date / go back to / marry partners who are men despite the fact that there is so much love and longing for the women they fell in love or hooked up with. The movies almost always close out with the queer/lesbian women either alone and/or single, sometimes surrounded by friends & family moving toward some forlorn and unclear future — what you see is that they’re alive and getting through the day.
It also wasn’t lost on me that the campier lesbian films (i.e. Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love, But I’m a Cheerleader!, Imagine Me and You) are the ones where lesbians/queer women end up with each other — and the more serious & emotionally/politically rich films are the ones where — all too often — the queer women end up alone or single and maybe a little heartbroken, but putting the pieces of their hearts back together and keeping it moving towards an unclear future. Granted, there are movies and TV shows that don’t quite fit that trend: Princess Cyd, the lesbian storyline on Netflix’s Easy, and Amazon’s One Mississippi come to mind. Princess Cyd makes space for abundant queer joy and imagines queerness without struggle; Easy shows queer women returning to each other after struggling with each other — either codependent patterns or hypocritical white feminist politics within the relationship and that the queer main characters have other close women in their lives; One Mississippi’s second season shows the transformation of a queer woman who previously thought of herself as straight learning to own her queerness and choose her butch lover at the end.
And hell, that’s life. But it got me thinking about what this trend might be doing to us and what it lets us know about our imaginations, if seeing these happier queer women’s love stories as a possible reality that our lives could actually look like or something we brush aside as an as an exceptional if not impossible, sweet fairytale. Yet the impossibility of long-term queer romance is simply not true — I know so many queer women who are in love with each other and building life, love, family, home, and community. As someone who has done and continues to do narrative change and strategic communications work to advance social justice movements and organizing campaigns, what hit me is that these narratives are indicating a struggle within our political imaginations, struggles that not only shape the media that gets created and consumed, but the material conditions of our lives as well.
In these times, when the clouds feel never-ending — whether it’s the latest attack on communities of color, queer and trans people, working class and disabled people from the Trump Administration, the list of murdered trans women of color getting longer, the most recent instance of state-sanctioned violence — it feels so urgent to cultivate and grow a rich, expansive, and beautiful political imagination in our movements — and yes, in the way queer women’s lives get depicted on screen.
When I say political imagination, I am talking about a dreaming and visioning that informs what we believe is possible in this lifetime and the lifetimes to come, what we envision the world to be. What do we imagine? What do we determine to be possible and what do we relegate to dreamland, a world of fairytales, or individual exceptions to the rule? It is the whole picture — not the day to day actions or yearly strategies that guide us, but the horizon, the future we orient ourselves towards.
It’s the way that 63% of white women in Alabama voted for Roy Moore and 53% of white women nationwide voted for Donald Trump. Not only because of the historical pattern and practice in which white women align with white supremacy, but because a world without sexual violence, particularly from the people most likely to harm us — white cis men — is written out of what is believed as possible (ex. some of the white women who supported Trump seemed resigned to sexual violence, using the rhetoric of ‘boys will be boys’). If the end of sexual violence not totally written out of the political imagination by right wing white men and women, it is used as a tool to reinforce white supremacy and patriarchy by positioning white cis men as the protectors of (white) women and girls, advancing a racist narrative that the real threat of sexual violence comes from an explicitly or implicitly racially coded characterization of ‘dangerous men’. In recent years, patriarchal white supremacists have included trans women in that narrative, misgendering us and using deeply-embedded racist dogwhistles to forward transmisogyny. Recent examples of this right-wing political imagination are the right-wing’s North Carolina’s HB2 (also known as the anti-trans ‘bathroom’ bill) where they claimed the law was necessary to protect women and girls from sexual assault and Donald Trump (a serial sexual abuser and white supremacist) launched his campaign slandering immigrants from Mexico as ‘rapists’ while right-wing pundits went on to calling his statements on the Access Hollywood tape ‘locker room talk’.
And it’s also the way that Tig Notaro’s TV show One Mississippi, if intense and triggering at times, offered a beautifully refreshing depiction of a world where we get to see a butch/femme queer cis women couple, who are both survivors of sexual violence and working on their own healing and transformation, get to fall in love in the US South. As a queer & dyke-identified femme trans woman who is a survivor and lives in the US South, to get to see that is a balm for the days when I wonder/worry if girls like me get that reality. The recent news that Amazon is dropping One Mississippi broke my heart, not only because we lose the beautiful butch and butch/femme representation on the screen, but we lose the one show that I know of where southern queers are front and center.
It’s the way that this trend of movies show queer women’s futures as unclear, aside from the fact that we are a bit heartbroken and alone; or when queer love and intimacy can either feel like magical realism or a campy fairy tale. Or the ways organizers around the country are imagining a world without white supremacy and the prison industrial complex, how celebrities, alongside farm and domestic worker organizers and women of color activist leaders are foreshadowing a world without rape or sexual harm in #TimesUp, the necessary and unapologetic demand for #Not1More deportation, the ways communities across the country are thinking through what a transitioning to a democratic, cooperative economy away from extractive fossil fuels and exploitative anti-worker capitalist infrastructure will look like.
TV shows, movies, the streets, the press, our kitchen tables, our heads and our hearts are all arenas in which these different political imaginations compete and struggle against each other. And I wonder, what would movies and TV shows that center queer/lesbian women look like, if those worlds and stories were aligned with our most bold, daring, hopeful, sexy, loving, radical, transformative political imaginations?
I could be wrong, but I don’t think it would look like another queer cis or trans girl, sitting alone watching the sunset or watching a love of her life tell her she will always love her then going to marry a man, piecing her heart together again and again and again.
The last movie I watched during that night’s mini lesbian movie marathon was A Date For Mad Mary, an Irish film that has a slowly building lesbian romance. What struck me about it was one of the characters lovingly but firmly sets boundaries with the woman she’s beginning to date — and the fact that good boundaries and the honest and direct communication of them was pivotal to both the plot and facilitating and generating character development on the part of the woman she’s in a relationship with. Even though it’s not foreshadowing something as radical as a world without prisons or a world without sexual violence, the fact that it stuck out to me reminded me that good boundaries and honest communication is what I hope the future looks like.
It’s all these little details and pieces that can strengthen a bold political imagination where our lives align with the values and visions we hold, allowing us to make those dreams a little bit more real, even at the interpersonal level of reimagining the ways we relate to each other and practice love and intimacy.
At the end of last year, I was preparing to travel to a good friend’s wedding over New Year’s, dredging up all these feelings around being single and around whether or not I should resign myself to being single from here on out. So I started writing a story, set years into the future where one of the biggest dreams I have for my life comes true: being a trans girl who’s alive and thriving, who has a sweetie, and is a mom to a little person in North Carolina.
Is it my most radical vision of the future? No. But it was a weirdly difficult yet beautiful practice of using the muscles of my political imagination for this deeply personal vision. On days where some of the clouds that cover the sky look like an administration setting up a division of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights to protect doctors who deny medical care based on their religious beliefs — threatening the health of trans people and people who need abortions and other reproductive health care — it feels like a beautiful blue sky beyond the clouds.
