Once upon a time, the need to kill off lesbian characters before the end of the story—or at least to kill off their same-sex relationship or their nonconforming identities —was so common it had a name: Dead Lesbian Syndrome.* Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt (source material for the Todd Haynes 2015 film Carol) was notable because it ended with the suggestion that Therese and Carol are going to form a lasting relationship.
Not that that the publication of that book, which Highsmith published under the pseudonym “Carol Morgan,” meant that the bad old days were over. Things were worse in other media, including television, which took even longer to expand the standard allowable fictional realities beyond the heteronormative. How and when that happened is the topic of Regan Latimer’s documentary Bulletproof: A Lesbian’s Guide to Surviving the Plot, which will be screened as Part of QFest St. Louis 2025 on Thursday May 29. Latimer combines personal reflections (she grew up watching a lot of TV since her reality as a tomboy who was bad at sports wasn’t exactly an instant route to popularity) with a history of (mostly female) queer representation in (mostly) television.
The first thing I have to say about Bulletproof is that it’s a lot of fun to watch—even if you didn’t grow up watching TV (as I didn’t: don’t have a clue about many of the shows referenced in this doc) you can enjoy her gently snarky brand of humor and the well-chosen clips and parodic animation she uses to back her key points. The second is that this is a seriously educational film in a similar vein to Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet and Dan Butler’s The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender. But Bulletproof is better than those films, because it includes analysis and information from bona fide experts alongside the many clips and personal stories.
Want to know why the stories you see on the screen seem so real and why it’s so easy to form parasocial relationships with people you know perfectly well you will never meet in real life (and who you also know do not exist at all, if they’re characters in a scripted story)? Media Psychologist Dr. Aiden Hirschfield is here to explain it all to you. Basically, because the media environment has evolved much faster than have human beings, so we get caught up in a state where we know that TV shows are fiction but we respond emotionally to them as if they were real. Or, as psychotherapist Sara Gilchrist says, our brains know the difference but our hearts don’t. And that’s just one sample of the insights offered up in Bulletproof, because I want to leave you with a reason to watch this film for yourself. | Sarah Boslaugh
* If you need more convincing, take a look at Autostraddle’s list of dead lesbian and bisexual characters on television, which as of August 27, 2024 numbered 240.
Bulletproof: A Lesbian’s Guide to Surviving the Plot will screen on Thursday, May 29 at 7:00 pm. QFest St. Louis runs May 27-June1 at the Hi-Pointe Theatre (1005 McCausland Ave.). More information and tickets are available from the Cinema St Louis web site. All short film programs are free of charge through the Gay-It-Forward program.
