Earlier this week, Alanna and I watched If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), which tells the stories of three lesbian couples who live in the same house during different time periods. It is apparently the sort-of sequel to If These Walls Could Talk (1996), a movie that is not gay and I have not seen.
The first of the three stories takes place in 1961 and stars Vanessa Redgrave as an elderly lesbian whose partner of 30 years, Abby, is in the hospital with a stroke. She’s unable to see Abby, as she’s legally not “family,” and later has to deal with an extremely punchable Paul Giamatti, who is technically a member of Abby’s family. It’s depressing, but makes a clear case for why queer couples need to the right to marry (beyond the whole “love is love” thing) in a way that I’d imagine wasn’t being talked about too much 21 years ago.
The middle segment is set in 1972 and, most importantly, stars a very hot, very butch Chloë Sevigny.
Michelle’s character lives with three friends (including Natasha Lyonne), who are all lesbians but absolutely terrible to butch Chloë. They view her “dressing like a man” and dating women as falling into stereotypical heterosexual roles, and it’s sort of painful to watch how nasty they are to her as a result. But I really cannot overstate how good she looks in this movie, and that alone makes it worth sitting through.
In the third and final segment, which you can really just skip, Ellen DeGeneres and Sharon Stone attempt to have a baby via sperm donor. They also have a weirdly long scene of rolling around in the sheets, during which it is unclear whether they are having sex or just rubbing each other’s backs. It’s not good.
Unfortunately the movie isn’t streaming on any major platforms, but Alanna did find it on a presumably illegal site here. Enjoy!
— Becca
Valencia by Michelle Tea
Fiction, April 2000
Valencia is a frenetic, fast-paced, and almost entirely plotless account of a year in the life of a 25-year-old queer punk in San Francisco. Here’s how it starts:
I sloshed away from the bar with my drink, sending little tsunamis of beer onto my hands, soaking into the wrist of my shirt. Don't ask me what I was wearing. Something to impress What's-Her-Name, the girl I wasn't dating. She had a girlfriend, she didn't need two. She needed someone to sleep naked with and share some sexual tension, and for that position I made myself available.
There’s a dance floor fight by page two and fisting and knife play by page six, two scenes that accurately set the tone for the rest of the book. It’s all a little grimy and gritty and dramatic. But with its visceral descriptions and stream-of-consciousness flow, it’s also compulsively readable.
The story feels real in a way that most novels don’t, and I’m sure that’s partly because it sort of is. Tea herself has confirmed that, despite it being labeled fiction, “...of course it’s memoir. It’s always fiction and always memoir.”
But there’s more to it than that. The experience of consuming Valencia feels less like reading a book than it does running into someone at a party who’s maybe had a little too much to drink but it doesn’t matter because they’ve got a great story to tell and they’re really good at telling it.
That familiarity also keeps things from seeming pretentious, which (from my decidedly not punk vantage point) can sometimes happen in stories about self-described “punks.” But for a book with characters named Spacegirl and Scrumptious and Bonzai, it’s pretty impressive how genuine it all feels.
There’s also just something special about a woman writing candidly about everything from sex and sex work to heartbreak and drug-fueled benders. In her words:
I was living in a way that historically women have not been allowed to live and still are pressured not to live. Whether that’s to have sexual agency or be promiscuous or to be queer or to experiment with their bodies, take drugs or do sex work ... I felt really excited to make a space for these experiences that was unapologetic and not tragic.
Making space for experiences is exactly what this book feels like. Tea doesn’t take the reader through a carefully constructed narrative arc or try to leave us with some sort of moral takeaway. Instead, she lets us follow her narrator around while she gets drunk and has sex in closets and makes illicit anticapitalist zines.
Queer points:
+7 for a character getting the word “lezzie” tattooed on her shoulder
+13 for teaching me that latex gloves were apparently a common part of sex for ‘90s lesbians in San Francisco
Buy it from your favorite local bookstore on Bookshop