Forbidden Love, our great Canadian sapphic love letter, remains a vital watch 31 years later

This is part of a series of essays in response to our recent project CBC Arts Presents: The 50 Greatest Films Directed by Canadians. We asked writers to choose a Canadian-directed film that they believe should have been included — particularly ones that fill the representational gaps in Canada's film history — and tell us why it deserves to be there.

I'll never forget that warm fall night in 1992 when I was attending premieres at Image+Nation, Montreal's queer film festival. The packed house was knocked out by the sheer brilliance, beauty and audacity of Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives, a new feature-length documentary by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman.

After exhaustive research, Fernie and Weissman interviewed several older lesbians about their experiences growing up in various parts of Canada. The interviewees discuss their feelings of isolation in the '40s, '50s and '60s, when there was little or no media representation of queer people (outside of very negative coverage). The women speak of sorrow and heartbreak, but also with great courage and determination. One woman talks about a custody battle with her ex-husband over their children, and his use of her being lesbian as a weapon against her. Another remembers being beaten by her mother when she tells her about having a crush on another woman.

But the film is full of amazing triumphs, too, including reconciliations between friends and family members who got over their homophobia and beautiful stories of parenting. The stereotype of the Humourless Feminist is forever shattered by brilliant one-liners throughout: "I've always said that the world should be run by post-menopausal women," one lesbian argues.

Before "diversity" became a buzzword, Fernie and Weissman were careful to ensure their film didn't just focus on the expected urban centres as lesbian enclaves. There's a lesbian rancher who lives on a farm, an Indigenous woman who has lived both on reserves and in cities, an immigrant who lives in Montreal — women from all regions of the country and varied backgrounds.

Anchoring the interviews is Ann Bannon, a lesbian author who wrote pulp fiction in the '50s, an era when lesbianism was still a love that dare not speak its name. She became famous as an author who wrote lesbian pulp that actually imagined happy endings for its characters — something that inspired the film's dramatic segments.

While much of the film relies on the documentary convention of talking heads, Forbidden Love was also formally innovative: it's a hybrid documentary. Throughout the film, there are a series of dramatic vignettes, set in the '50s, in which two women escape the straight conformity expected of them and run off together to an imagined, erotic utopia. Each dramatic segment concludes with the actors staring into the camera (and thus at us, the audience), gently reminding us that we are indeed watching a movie. These interludes reinforce the power of storytelling and rewrite the overriding narrative of lesbian pulp fiction of the past, which usually ended in tragedy.

Notably, Forbidden Love was one of the final features in the storied history of Studio D, the NFB's short-lived but wildly successful women's studio. Studio D had come under criticism for taking so long to commission stories on the lesbian community — but they made up for it with this tremendous film.

I still screen Forbidden Love in a documentary class I teach at Concordia University every year. And each time students marvel at the power of the women interviewed, as they are never portrayed as victims, but rather victorious survivors.

On that night in 1992, during the nadir of the AIDS crisis, when there were no treatments and we were losing people at such a profound rate, Forbidden Love was a vital dose of defiant optimism. That feeling remains to this day.

The film can be streamed on the NFB's excellent site, and it was also re-released on a special edition Blu-ray last year by Canadian International Pictures. In 2015, authors Jean Bruce and Gerda Cammaer wrote an entire book on Forbidden Love as part of the Queer Film Classics book series I co-edit (with Tom Waugh). And I was thrilled to be the only dude to be invited to contribute an essay to that Blu-ray package, further cementing my status as honorary lesbian.

I can't recommend this film enough. Forbidden Love remains one of my favourite documentaries of all time. If you're feeling flattened or exhausted by all of the current dire news headlines (and who isn't?), this film will give you precisely the shot of hope you need.

Watch Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives for free via the NFB.