Here Come the Girls

We had heard that the short films that comprise Here Come the Girls were good, so we eagerly anticipated some viewing pleasure on a Friday night. Alas, we were stunned by how relentlessly negative and trading in stereotypes these films were, so I definitely wouldn’t recommend them.

 The first of the films had acting so bad that we almost turned off the DVD. We persevered and the second film, Private Life, which is set in 1950s Yorkshire, was the star of the series. The production values were higher here and the story was more interesting. Also, it had a happy ending.

The other films were mostly desperately unhappy (a mother trying to force her lesbian daughter to be feminine; a young lesbian killed by a falling horseshoe (see the significance of that “lucky” object); an older, sick lesbian hampered with a mentally ill or perhaps demented partner; domestic violence, where a femme woman didn’t want to go to the police about her supposedly “butch” girlfriend), or they were based on stereotypes so old-fashioned as to be embarrassing (a butch narrator talking about how she’s “stone” and wants to treat her “femme” woman right; a femme wanting to use a dildo on her unwilling partner, who thinks butches don’t do that kind of thing).

Happy Birthday, which was the strap-on film just mentioned, was so ridiculous that I could only hope it was tongue-in-cheek. If it was serious, then I feel sad that so many young lesbians apparently still think they have to be either butch or femme and that there are such clear-cut roles.

In short, so to speak, I felt that I wasted an evening on these films. I hope someone will starting making some more challenging, positive, up-to-date LGBTQ films.