-There was once a time when the rom-com was considered the most heteronormative of genres – from the relegation of the “gay best friend” to the sidelines (permitted on occasion to reassure the protagonist, or crack a couple of jokes), to Harry telling Sally with unshakeable self-confidence that – because of inevitable sexual tension – “men and women can’t be friends”. Often, these films have even been helpfully instructive on how to navigate straight relationships. 2000s flicks like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days advise on the pitfalls of repelling your average straight man, or its gender-flipped, Mel Gibson-starring counterpart What Women Want which supposedly bares all about women’s innermost desires.
The queer rom-com – which finally puts LGBTQ+ love in the limelight – has been steadily gaining on its boy-meets-girl precursor. With the double release of Red, White & Royal Blue and the much-hyped second season of Heartstopper this month, narratives about queer romance have become accessible to a much bigger audience. The first is based on the romance novel of the same name by Casey McQuiston and traverses classic rom-com territory of royal prince falls for (sort of) ordinary boy – except he’s the US president’s son; the second is based on Alice Oseman’s (arguably too) wholesome webcomic about two teen boys.
And there’s more: Billy Eichner’s Bros, released last year, was the first gay rom-com from a major studio. Then, in 2021, Single All the Way, starring Jennifer Coolidge (admitting herself that all the gays “are obsessed” with her), became Netflix’s first festive gay rom-com, Christmas being a staple of the wider genre. Fire Island followed in 2022, and, with Love, Simon, The Thing About Harry, and My Fake Boyfriend, the list of recent gay rom-coms goes on.
But there’s one thing clearly missing: women and non-binary people going head over heels for each other too. Though 2022 – and now seemingly 2023 – was “the year of the gay rom-com”, we’re still waiting on even a week for the lesbian rom-com. There are less than a handful of recent ones: Alice Wu’s Crush and Kristen Stewart’s Happiest Season, both released in 2020. Anything’s Possible (its own title seeming in awe at its own existence) centres on a trans high school girl, while rom-coms with non-binary protagonists are even scarcer.
It’s a lack of representation which goes way back, with the queer theorist Susan Hayward arguing in 2006 that, historically, funding had always been funnelled towards male filmmakers. Strangely enough, though, there has been no shortage of WLW dramas over the past few years, with The Confessions of Frannie Langton, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Vita and Virginia, The World to Come and Colette seeing sizzling, wind-swept romances between women – they just don’t end well.
“These films are all set in the 19th century or earlier, when it was historically impossible for queer people to live together openly, so the historical circumstances are at least partially responsible for the fate of the lovers,” says Dolores McElroy, lecturer in film and media at University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in queer cinema.
Filmmakers like Francis Lee, whose drama Ammonite locks Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet in doomed love, also share an instinct that’s perhaps understandable: wanting to rewrite the history of queer women who were once omitted from the narrative entirely (even if, in the case of real-life palaeontologist Mary Anning, that means making up a fictional affair). However, current cinema seems suspiciously less interested in exploring the histories of gay men, who (by the way) were also persecuted. With their feminine-presenting, generally white leads, these tragedies are also fairly fixed in the ways in which they’re happy to present lesbians onscreen.
Film still hasn’t been able to shift an extremely uncomfortable relationship with queer women and non-binary people – and the fact that lesbian romances nearly always end in something like estrangement or diphtheria feels like unfair treatment. The “bury your gays” trope, where queer characters are butchered as mere side-plots, disproportionately targets lesbians, with 157 deaths and counting. While film and TV today is generating gay male fantasies of five-tiered iced cakes at royal weddings and mushy school trips to Paris, it’s as if lesbian love must always be viewed through the lens of oppression – and the love must die.
Maybe there’s a fear that lesbians just won’t buy your usual lovey-dovey tropes. Another breed of lesbianism in films like Bottoms (Emma Seligman’s lesbian reimagining of Fight Club), Booksmart and A League of Their Own are all defined by barbed humour and a kind of spiky don’t-give-a-fuck-ery. But it’s also well-known that women – often straight women – are the ones both writing and watching gay rom-coms like Heartstopper, so why aren’t we being given lesbian rom-coms?
The reason why the lesbian tragedy and gay rom-com became so prevalent, Dolores says, may be “simply that the studios figured out they could make money on them.” Shamim Sarif, screenwriter and director of 2008’s I Can’t Think Straight, where two women of colour actually live happily ever after, agrees, saying: “It’s still very hard to finance movies with queer content, particularly with lesbians at the centre.”
This doesn’t mean there isn’t an appetite for them. “It would be great if the entire lesbian community really came out to bat for artists,” says Shamim. “So many of them have made it with an incredible base of fans and friends of people who are really related to films, but I would love to see that expand exponentially.”
Should we even want lesbian and non-binary steered rom-coms? The genre is often a lesson in how to get married, which is, you might think, a patriarchal institution. “In a way, many of these works are quite heteronormative and homo-normative, simply plugging gay people into a very straight formula without letting their queerness alter the world that the characters occupy, or the usual formulaic story,” says Dolores. “A truly queer rom-com might need to reimagine what a happy ending would be outside of marriage or even coupledom.”
The cult following behind rare gems like 1995’s The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love shows that, whether or not the story is conventional, there’s a desire – nay a need – to see more LGBTQ+ stories with a happily ever after. “It was our experience with I Can’t Think Straight that people were really ready for something which had a happy ending, especially for two women of colour, which at the time was kind of groundbreaking,” says Shamim. “It was important to me to show a vision that was hopeful and romantic, and the overwhelming response we had from all over the world made it clear that a lot of people felt the same way.”