If you believe what you see on the big and small screen, lesbians are everywhere. They're on Queer as Folk. They're on Sex and the
If you believe what you see on the big and small screen, lesbians are everywhere. They're on Queer as Folk. They're on Sex and the City. And they're in films like Kissing Jessica Stein.
These recent lesbian portrayals fall into two categories. There are Career Lesbians, who are and will always be gay, as depicted on shows like Queer as Folk. And there are Temporary Lesbians, characters who choose a sexual orientation the way they would the day's outfit, as shown in Sex and the City and Kissing Jessica Stein.
It's the Temporary Lesbians that are causing all the confusion.
Most people have heard of that college phenomenon of the LUG, the "lesbian until graduation." But according to the entertainment industry, Temporary Lesbians are all around us, even after college, just waiting to explore their lesbian tendencies for a few months before turning straight again.
In the fourth season of Sex and the City, when the show's writers had seemingly exhausted every possible heterosexual coupling for Samantha Jones, they decided she should turn to women. Samantha, the uber-heterosexual power publicist, begins dating a female artist, only to discover (big surprise) that she's sick of too much talk and not enough cock.
Jessica Stein, a frenetic copyeditor, has the opposite problem. After failing to meet the right guy (after all, lesbians are just women who can't meet men, right?), she answers a "Women Seeking Women" ad on a whim and finds herself in a long-term relationship with Helen, a gallery director whose sexual proclivities are all over the map. (If you haven't seen the movie and want to keep the ending a surprise, you may not want to continue reading.)
Jessica and Helen's relationship continues along a predictable — albeit delightfully comic — series of twists and turns. Jessica overcomes an initial squeamishness about sex, her suburban Jewish family is surprisingly accepting of Helen, and she and Helen move in together.
And then the filmmakers drop the bomb: Jessica, it seems, is not really a lesbian. After several months of living together, Helen tells Jessica that she's dissatisfied with their sex life; they haven't slept together in a month. The two break up, we jump forward three months, and the film ends with Jessica running into her ex-boyfriend and exchanging phone numbers before meeting Helen for coffee and girl talk. Helen, meanwhile, has found a new girlfriend, and the three are all pals.
Jessica Stein, we are supposed to believe, tries out lesbianism for a few months at the ripe age of 28, decides it isn't for her, and goes back to dating guys.
Sexuality, according to these portrayals, is somewhat akin to getting ice cream at Baskin Robbins. "You're out of vanilla? Sure, I'll take strawberry, no problem."
There's nothing wrong with people trying out different sexualities. But the idea that you can dip your toe in the waters of homosexuality, whether for a week, a month, or a year, and then go right back to being straight again carries with it the dangerous implication that that is what gay people are doing as well. They have simply made a choice, the logic goes, and they could easily go back. It's a confusing — some might say harmful — message to be sending out to the heterosexual masses, most of whom already regard homosexuality as a big mystery.
Sure, there are bisexuals, those who can go back and forth between gay and straight relationships. But these portrayals don't acknowledge bisexuality as an option. Lesbianism is presented as something that one can become fully immersed in for weeks and months before going back to the safety of heterosexuality, apparently without ever looking back. Stretched to its extreme, this message of "homosexual choice" isn't far from the logic espoused by Religious Right leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
In these stories, being gay is cute, trendy, and carries no greater consequence in each character's life than the strategic purchase of a few sex toys. Kissing Jessica Stein, in particular, portrays lesbianism as less about sex and more about trading make-up and fashion tips. Of course, over-simplification is necessary to sketch a character in broad strokes on the screen; these stories do not claim to be about the complications of being gay. Straight people have their silly romantic comedies, and gay people should, too. But these writers, talented as they are, don't acknowledge that the comic elements of a relationship become funnier when there is some darkness to provide contrast. As they are, these portrayals come off as simply condescending.
Interestingly, Sex and the City's first foray into bisexuality addressed the issue in a more forthright manner. In an episode from the second season entitled "Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl," Carrie attends a party that is largely populated with bisexual twentysomethings. During a game of Spin the Bottle, Carrie has to make out with Dawn (amusingly played by Alanis Morissette). Though she says the kiss was okay ("kinda like chicken"), she bolts from the party soon after, never to see the twentysomethings again. "I realized that they could do whatever they wanted, but deep down, I was too old to play this game," she says in her signature voiceover. Funny how when a character stays true to her sexuality, she has to make an apology for it.
The Sex and the City book also delves into the murky waters of bisexuality. In the chapter entitled, "When Mr. Big is Away, the Girl Comes to Play," Carrie meets a bisexual woman who invites her to her apartment for a glass of wine. "Maybe I've secretly been a lesbian my whole life and I just didn't know it," she muses. But when it's time to get intimate with the woman, Carrie takes off.
So why all the Temporary Lesbianism in Kissing Jessica Stein and Sex and the City, especially when, in the case of the latter, none existed in the original source material?
Because straight men love 'em.
I saw Kissing Jessica Stein (which was written by two straight women) with a straight male friend. "I saw the film from two sides," he admitted to me during the closing credits. "I wanted the two girls to hook up so that I could see them getting it on. And when Jessica was with a guy, I wanted that to work out, because I could imagine myself in his shoes."
The fantasy of a woman who can be with another woman for a finite period of time before getting some good-old-fashioned dick has long been a staple of the straight male repertoire. What straight male doesn't get excited over the idea of two women together? The fantasy is, as two guys goofily note in the film, "double sexy." Significantly though, I don't think we'll be seeing a similar plot line in a gay male context any time soon.
The issue that all this raises is whether filmmakers have a responsibility to show realistic portrayals of homosexuality in their work, or if it's fine to portray same-sex attraction as something that can be turned on and off at will. Jessica Stein and Sex and the City are aimed at mainstream audiences. And they have, accordingly, a mainstream, palatable yet titillating view of female sexuality. Writers, the gay novelist Edmund White argues in a recent essay, should have "a philosophical devotion to the truth and a conviction not only that it will set us free but that it is in itself desirable and preferable to all comforting lies."
Unfortunately, in these cases, the lies are what sell.
