Desert Hearts
JENNIFER VANASCO
The first time I saw the film "Desert Hearts" I was a junior in college. Two months before, I had met a woman who lived in another dorm, and quicker than lightning we were both out to ourselves and our families.
This was the early 1990s. There was no Worldwide Web for us to research our newly discovered sexual orientations; the two tiny, local bookstores in town had nothing remotely gay-ish except for books by Gore Vidal.
Even at my women's college, there seemed to be few entry points into a gay identity. Attending the campus gay group seemed scary, somehow, radical in a way neither of us were ready to be.
Other editors at the college paper where I spent most of my time were gay; so were many of the women in my very gay-positive Shakespearean theater troupe. They were warm and helpful and teased us gently as we worked our way into a new world.
Yet we saw very little evidence that gayness existed in the wider universe; we weren't really sure what being lesbians would mean, even to ourselves. But one night, my housemother rented "Desert Hearts" and wheeled the TV/VCR cart into the living room for the whole dormitory to view. My lover and I were the only ones to show up; we were transfixed.
"Desert Hearts" (1986) is a love story, and one of the first full-length films to be about, by and for lesbians. It takes place in Reno in the 1950s, when buttoned-up English professor Vivian (Helen Shaver), who comes to stay at a desert ranch while waiting the requisite six weeks for a divorce, meets Cay (a sexy Patricia Charbonneau), a devil-may-care, out lesbian.
"Desert Hearts" is no "'L' Word." There's no glamour, and no gay community. There's not much cleavage, lipstick or gender angst.
There's no superstar cameos. There's no sex chart. There's not a lot of processing. For almost the whole movie, Vivian flutters at the edge of gayness, trying to keep herself from loving Cay until she finally collapses into passion, in one of the sexiest love scenes ever filmed.
The movie perfectly captures the intense, obsessive love familiar to every lesbian. My lover and I were experiencing that sort of love then, and there it was on screen. We felt validated.
At the time, it seemed to me that the film painted a picture of lesbians as rebels, and that's what we felt like: two against the world. Fighting against the world was what I thought it meant to be a lesbian for a long time.
I saw "Desert Hearts" again this weekend, 15 years later. It's now part of a special two-DVD set released by Wolfe Video that includes interviews with Charbonneau and Shaver and commentary from director Donna Deitch. Watching it again made me rethink those first, long-ago impressions.
What struck me was how real the film still seems, what an honest movie it is. "Desert Hearts" doesn't end with a wedding, but with a hopeful uncertainty. Families aren't abandoned or converted, but battered against. There isn't a rainbow parade, but a quiet stretching out of a hand. Even when new, Vivian and Cay's love isn't shiny perfect plastic, but good hardwood, polished with work and time, and marked with intrinsic imperfections.
That is, "Desert Hearts" is a true love story, because it doesn't sugarcoat love, or make it into a soap opera, or imply that to love is to abandon all aspects of your former life. It is as meaningful to me at 35—though for different reasons—as it was to me at 20.
We have access to a lot of information about gayness now. The Web is an encyclopedia of all things gay; even the smallest bookstores have tomes with gay characters or issues in them; queer studies is common at almost all colleges. There are movies (though not many) and TV shows (though not enough) that relate stories about our lives.
Yet we still need "Desert Hearts" for the reminder that we don't have to rush into love, that romance savored slowly can be as intense as the lightning-strike kind.
We still need "Desert Hearts" because it's not glamorous, just as most of our lives aren't glamorous. We need it because it's not about other people, but about us.