Forbidden Love: Unashamed Stories Of Lesbian Lives

"I think post-menopausal women should run the world," says one of the outspoken interviewees in Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie's excellent chronicle of lesbian life in the 1950s and 1960s in Canada. Winner of a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Documentary, Forbidden Love offers an artful mix of contemporary interviews, archival footage of Vancouver night life (including the regular police raids) and dramatic vignettes of a fictional couple named Laura and Mitch who act out a campy liaison reminiscent of the lesbian pulp novels of yore (including a steamy love scene that's equivalent to what you'd see in an R-rated film). The interviewees share vivid recollections of struggling with their sexual identity, looking for lesbian bars, and working within the butch/fem paradigm. Many of the stories are hilarious (one interviewee recalls searching in vain for a lesbian bar until a mouthy bigot told her to go find her own kind at a particular location--to which she replied "thank you very much"), others are touching and romantic, and some are sad. Stephanie Ozard recalls an abusive relationship where she played the dutiful fem, and could expect a "fist in the mouth" from her butch girlfriend if she stepped out of that role. It's an unfortunate reminder that certain types of behavior cut across all kinds of social and sexual boundaries. But at the same time the "unashamed" stories in Forbidden Love are refreshingly apolitical: there's no agenda here, except perhaps to remind us all that underneath we are the same--human beings, people who feel pain and sometimes bring others joy. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (R. Pitman)