The lesbian period drama, that most noble filmic genre, explains everything there is to know about human nature. Most 21st-century queers no longer spend their days strolling chilly beaches and their evenings stalking the hallways of candlelit manors, but that doesn’t mean these movies are irrelevant! To the contrary, many of their themes are universal.
Lesbian period dramas are about longing! They are about slow-burn lust that turns incendiary when it’s finally gratified! They are about patriarchal systems ruining everything good and worthy in the world for everybody! They are about making us all weep ugly, choking sobs of grief for the travails of real and imagined gay women who preceded us in time!
Sure, they’re also about award-winning cinematography for full-frontal nudity, and about securing Oscar nominations for straight actresses. But the experience of composing florid epistles of adoration for your crush only to fall silent when they actually make eye contact with you remains deeply relatable to queer audiences. Everyone has a favorite lesbian period drama, and naturally, every astrological sign can be described through the same lens, which brings me to my task.
To avoid being forced to take to the seaside to recover from the experience of binge-watching 12 pairs of thin, corseted white women get forced asunder by an unforgiving world, I played it loose with the definition of “period piece” for this list. In addition to expected offerings depicting the 18th century and the 1950s, we’re gonna mix it up with some works that were contemporaneous upon release but have since become visually and thematically representative of a particular moment in history. (I also tossed in two TV shows, just to make sure this project obligated me to watch a few dozen more hours of lesbians emoting about accidental miscommunications.)
SPOILERS AHOY: If you’re bothered by plot details, be cautious about reading further.
How will you fare? Will your lesbians’ love be allowed to last? Will your lesbians even live? What’s your lesbian period drama Sun, Moon, Rising, and Venus? Read on to find out.
Click here to jump to a sign: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces.
Aries is the reimagining of A League of Their Own, all eight episodes. Like the 1992 movie, the Prime Video series is populated by women with so much ambition to play baseball that they’ll claw through obstacle, indignity, and even a makeover montage for the opportunity. Even when victory is denied, no loss can ever stop them for good: the constant struggle and competition for worth is the point.
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The overarching plot of the TV series remains the same, covering the formation and first season of The Rockford Peaches — the most successful team in the history of 1943-54’s All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — but the characters are freshly created and more fully fleshed out. In the film, none of the characters are canonically queer. Now, catcher Carson (Abbi Jacobson) is discovering she’s much more interested in kissing a tall redheaded slugger like Greta (D’Arcy Carden) than she ever was previously with her G.I. husband.
In life, both the League and the Peaches excluded Black players from eligibility, which in turn excluded Black perspectives from the movie depicting the history of the team. But the show now extends our view to Max Chapman (Chanté Adams) who, rejected outright by racism, has to find avenues other than the Peaches to pursue her dream. There’s a lot of Aries energy in this show, and Max is its fiery heart. Max Chapman is going to play baseball. Period. That’s it! A fact. In a world that denies her desire at every turn, she simply won’t be discouraged — not by institutional denial, not even by her mother’s disapproval. Her drive for the life and love she wants is so strong that she will either make it happen or die in the continued attempt.
“I’m done thinking about the end,” she tells Carson when she finally gets her shot and is accepted to a pro team. “I would rather have five minutes of what this feels like right now than a whole lifetime of before.”
Even when beset by demoralization, an Aries just can’t feel any other way about life.
Taurus is The Favourite: all moody maximalism and mommy kink, with a side of grudge-holding as a form of survival.
In the early 1700s, the duchess Sarah (Rachel Weisz) proxy-rules England and controls the country’s war with France via her codependent, controlling relationship with Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Distracted by matters of state, Sarah initially fails to notice the manipulations of her impoverished cousin Abigail (Emma Stone), who gradually supplants her as the Queen’s lover and confidante.
The Favourite is chiefly composed of wigs, wide-angle shots, and repeated threats of whipping. An aura of menace suffuses every conversation, but a distinctly Taurean appreciation for the preposterous breaks through the poisonous luxury of the setting in sledgehammer blows of comedic timing. The dancing scene between the Duchess and Baron Masham is straight-faced absurdity straight out of a sketch comedy. The later fight between Masham and Abigail (like the dance scene, choreographed by Constanza Macras) is slapstick. And the Queen’s sudden, shrieking fits of pique at innocuous provocations sound exactly like a hangry Taurus.
Eventually Abigail’s machinations prevail, and she usurps Sarah’s former privileges and position of influence as the Queen’s bedchamber maid. She even manages to have her rival exiled, much to the ignorant detriment of our Taurean Queen, who has lost the one ally honest enough to tell her to her face when she looks like a badger. Now, Anne is stuck with a lover who sadistically threatens to crush her pet rabbits while she sleeps. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, uncowed in exile, never sees revenge in the film, but she eventually outlived them all.
Nothing but the absolutely bonkers explosion of chaos somehow contained within the original L Word could even attempt to represent Gemini here. It’s the way that Geminis live, and love.
Did The L Word represent life as a WLW in the latter aughties accurately? No, with the possible exception of Alice Pieszecki’s fantastical third-season rebound with a “vampire” following a bisexual speed dating event she attended to get over her breakup. But did The L Word accurately convey the energy of the years 2004-2009 over the course of its six-season run? It did, like nothing before or since.
The L Word was a show that boldly gave no fucks about narrative continuity, character development, or even likability. The L Word did care about ensuring that its characters looked like they knew how to fuck, bringing in what is now known as an intimacy coordinator prior to filming the first season to teach its mostly straight cast to fake-finger each other convincingly. Did this set of priorities result in quote-unquote “good” TV? Lol, of course not! Instead, it was absolutely riveting.
Many of the behaviors and attitudes exhibited on this show were not in any way defensible, then or now. It’s not even that it doesn’t hold up, most of it was sus even at the time, and in that respect the show is a terribly accurate depiction of culture in the latter-aughties era. Every single character (even Dana, R.I.P.) is explicitly shown to be an irredeemable asshole at multiple points. Between seasons, entire plot arcs and characters would disappear with no explanation whatsoever. Established personalities switched on a dime without acknowledgement, new characters walked in and everyone else acted as if they’d been present all along. Everyone drank lots of Dos Equis due to product endorsement. Pam Grier was there!
At the time The L Word was marketed as prestige TV, but in practice it was really much more like scripted professional wrestling featuring mid-20000s Hollywood lesbian stereotypes. Whoever was on the creative team seemed to be aware of fan criticism and responded by slamming the viewers with ever more pointed disservice. Plotlines grew increasingly meta as writer character Jenny Schecter, loosely based on The L Word’s showrunner and widely acknowledged to be the most awful personality ever depicted on TV, wrote a magazine story and then a movie based on the lives of the other characters, which then affected said characters’ “real” lives. In the final season, the show suddenly killed off Jenny and turned the final eight episodes into a whodunit revolving around the murder that was rumored to be intended as a prelude to a lesbians-in-prison series. In hindsight, it’s all so in-your-face unhinged that it’s hard not to grudgingly respect it.
Even as The L Word’s writing was nonsensical, the acting was so affecting that viewers continued to tune in loyally even as we cringed while watching, and that’s why The L Word represents Gemini here. For most of the zodiac, the overwhelming amount of tangentially connected nonsense of a late May/early June baby’s life is tough to follow, but the Gemini level of charm is so intense that everyone stays obsessed anyway.
Summerland initially seems like an odd choice for the cardinal water sign, given that Cancers are stereotypically regarded as nurturers. For the first half of the film, Gemma Arterton’s Alice spends all of her time stomping around looking incredible in a tartan coat but behaving like an absolute asshole to children. Her routine of ostentatiously buying herself treats in front of covetous little kids who can’t afford them is interrupted when a child is delivered directly to her doorstep: Frank is an evacuee from the London Blitz, whose father is a fighter pilot and whose mother is otherwise unavailable doing wartime work.
Eventually, in spite of the odds — I cannot stress how much of a jerk Alice is to this poor displaced pre-teen — they bond and she becomes attached to him in her own way.
Turns out Alice is so unpleasant to everyone because she’s hauling around her own boatload of suppressed emotional trauma. Her ish, which she “manages” via deflection and denial, is still so raw that she breaks down at the very sight of a record she used to enjoy dancing to with her former lover, Vera. (Somewhat understandable, as most of us would remain in dire emotional straits for at least a decade after being dumped by someone as beautiful Gugu Mbatha-Raw.) But still, we’ve all eventually got to start parenting ourselves at some point.
The queer lady action finally kicks off once the emotional walls between Alice and Frank come down. Surprise: Vera is Frank’s mother and, using strange bisexual logic, purposefully arranged to have her evacuating kid sent to live with her child-hating ex. After an awkward reunification following the death of Frank’s dad, nobody starts making out immediately, but then — flash forward — it’s the 1970s now and Alice is still an asshole, but an asshole with love in her life. She and Vera are partnered, and are loving moms to adult Frank.
All Cancers know you can’t hide from attachment forever. Emotion will find you even if you try to shut it out, and the only way to move forward is to face it honestly. And occasionally, even in a lesbian period drama, you might get an unlikely happy ending.
The real Bessie Smith was an Aries. Queen Latifah is a Pisces. The HBO TV biopic Bessie, starring Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith, was released during Taurus season 2015. And yet for all of that, Bessie is a Leo of a movie.
It’s got the classic poverty-to-superstardom-to-poverty-then-back-to-the-top-again narrative of the best VH1 Behind the Music episodes. It’s got an incredible soundtrack. It’s got Queen Latifah wearing a lot of sequins while singing to crowds of people, and wearing nothing at all while singing contemplatively to herself in the mirror. It’s got a disturbing scene in which Klan members attack one of Bessie’s shows, shouting slurs and threatening her, but then it’s got Bessie marching off the stage and out of the tent to run the racists off of her turf before resuming the show.
The Leo spirit of Bessie jumps out midway through the movie in a line delivered by a handsome gin bootlegger. After demurring that names are dangerous in his business and refusing to offer his own to Bessie, he plays their introduction casual until she calls bullshit on his apparent failure to recognize her celebrity.
“Oh, I know who you are,” he says, his drawl growing thicker with every word, “but what do you want me to call you?”
No Leo could resist that fine balance of cautious distance and forward familiarity, both a challenge and an invitation. Smash cut to the bedroom, where Bessie makes him scream out the name he’d initially refused to give.
“Richard,” as we learn in that scene, eventually becomes the lone contender left standing in non-monogamous Bessie’s romantic life by the time the credits roll. The quiet, steady heart of the film throughout, however, is Bessie’s relationship with her girlfriend Lucille (played by ludicrously gorgeous Tika Sumpter). Patient, supportive, and sexy, Lucille creates the movie’s most tender and intimate moments with Bessie. She provides a grounding sense of safety in a cutthroat business. Happy to play second fiddle as a dancer on stage, she eventually grows tired of being sidelined on the home front. When she breaks off the relationship, craving a family of her own, the pain of her loss sends Bessie into a catastrophic downward spiral.
“Showbiz life can’t last forever,” Lucille tells Bessie regretfully. “I just want a normal life.”
But to an artist like Bessie, or to your average Leo sun sign, showbiz is life. To be heard, understood, and appreciated, in that order of priority — that’s the impelling force driving every instant of existence as a Leo.
The Handmaiden, like its director Park Chan-Wook, is a Virgo. This movie is so beautiful and it stressed me out so badly. In this Korean adaptation of the novel Fingersmith, a thief allies with a swindler to steal an inheritance from an abused aristocrat, in three parts. Every frame of the film is sumptuous as fuck. The stakes of failure for both protagonists are incredibly fucked-up. But what makes it so special is the unexpected but so welcomed happy ending, which includes the torture and death of noxious abusers. That outcome is entirely dependent on empathy, self-sacrificing devotion, and the perfect implementation of complicated planning based entirely on trust between two women.
Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), the Korean thief, believes herself capable of defrauding another to ill end —and could! — until she is confronted with a serious case of lust and an attendant drive to protect. Hideko (Kim Min-hee), the Japanese lady, would unfeelingly consign another to suffering in her place… until her own awakening of desire and accompanying adoration finds her willing to sacrifice her own life rather than commit her beloved betrayer to a terrible fate. Escape for either woman would be impossible without flawless execution of multifactorial plotting depending on the absolute deceit of powerful men.
Not only do Sook-hee and Hideko pull it off, but then, after thoroughly destroying both the library and lives of those who thought to dominate them, they joyfully replicate postures from the erotic manuscripts coveted by their captors, this time for their own pleasure. They couldn’t have done it alone — not because either wasn’t capable, but because each only dared to risk everything on the other’s behalf. Both Count Fujiwara and Uncle Kouzuki were doomed from the instant these two women laid eyes on each other. But oppressors never know when to cut their losses against Virgos until it’s too late.
Libras are odd, borderline pretentious art films that have taken human form. Thus, Libra is 1974’s single-camera black-and-white Je tu il Elle (“I You He She”), written, directed, produced by, and starring Chantal Akerman.
Not a hell of a lot happens in this movie, but the Libra vibes are apparent from the start. “And I left a tiny white room on the ground floor, as narrow as a corridor, where I lie motionless and alert on my mattress,” the protagonist and only named character, Julie, monologues by way of introduction. “The first day I painted the furniture blue. The second day I repainted it all green.” And so we begin.
Julie spends the first third of the film — a month, by her reckoning — isolated in her tiny apartment. She lies around, writes longhand on loose-leaf paper, and subsists on sugar eaten straight from the bag with a spoon. She tries for an exhibitionist moment at one point, posing naked in front of the unobscured windows, but only a few people pass by, then no more. So instead she admires her own bare reflection in the dark window before finally exiting her self-imposed confinement.
Julie spends a day hitchhiking with a truck driver, who seems quietly amiable but becomes less palatable when he requires an out-of-frame hand-job. He delivers her to the apartment of her (presumably ex-)girlfriend, who first asks her to leave, but instead makes her a sandwich when she says she’s hungry. Then Julie doesn’t even eat the damn sandwich! Its creation was just a prelude to seduction before the two women share a rolling, grasping, body-pressing nude wrestling match of a sex scene for 20 minutes. Then she slips out of bed as the other woman sleeps, gathers her clothes, and leaves. The end!
Maybe it’s just the Libras of my acquaintance who seem prone to isolate in extended bouts of hyperfixation on their own art projects, emerging briefly to engage in intense sexual encounters that end without goodbyes. But Julie’s observational, opaque sense of exhibitionism is objectively a shared Libra quality.
In the most unflinchingly realistic depiction of 1996 ever committed to film, every man in Bound is a big-suited mafioso and every woman is a black leather-wearing lesbian. Okay, so Bound is stylized, and gloriously so — what else did you expect to see in this space for Scorpio?
Mob moll Violet’s dropping of jewelry down her sink is such a Scorpio method of hitting on the new handywoman next door. Recently paroled thief Corky’s commitment to rob the mafia of two million dollars is such a Scorpio method of responding to an orgasm from a high femme on the floor of an unfinished apartment. Violet’s mafia boyfriend Caesar literally laundering blood from money and hanging it to dry throughout his apartment? Also a Scorpio moment. Jennifer Tilly sitting casually in the curtains of fresh bills, unwilling to assist and therefore refraining from calling attention to the unusual nature of the scenario? That’s an entire Scorpio mood.
The first stage of Violet and Corky’s robbery plot goes off without a hitch. Gina Gershon performs the world’s sexiest recorded breaking-and-entering felony using her lockpick earrings, then removes and stashes the money as planned. But when Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) chooses to problem-solve differently than the women had assumed, Violet is trapped, and the three become entangled in a shifting, nail-biting series of threatened alliances in order to keep all of their fingers and make it through the night alive. It’s a cortisol-raising extended sequence of constant life-or-death reactions, prominently featuring an unsubtly queer scene in which Corky, tied up, literally breaks out of a locked closet.
Three’s a crowd in this scenario, so eventually Pantoliano’s got to go. Finally turning the tables at film’s end, Violet gets the drop on Caesar before he can kill Corky.
“If you had it in you to pull that trigger, you would have done it a long time ago,” he insists. “You don’t want to kill me. No, I know you don’t!”
“Caesar,” Violet sighs in her perfect squeaky voice. “You don’t know shit.”
Then she pulls the trigger to deliver him into a theater kid’s dream death scene, flailing out his final throes on a floor of wet white paint.
In the end Corky and Violet get the money and ride into the sunset in a big red truck, both wearing coordinated dark sunglasses. That, my friends, is a Scorpio’s idea of a happy ending.
In Desert Hearts, a 1985 depiction of 1959, Columbia professor Vivian seeks a divorce from her professionally advantageous but personally dissatisfying marriage. Upon landing in Reno to establish the six weeks of state residency necessary to dissolve her union, she’s immediately confronted with an entire city full of nosy, extroverted Sagittarians. To the earth sign-coded Vivian, this seems like a real horror movie set-up for a minute… until she meets 10-years-younger, openly queer Cay, who both frightens and attracts Vivian with her irrepressible lack of inhibition.
Homophobic censure from the surrounding community is no match for Cay’s moves. Sneaking pantsless in the community kitchen for a late-night snack with her crush is just the prelude to a make-out session in a rare desert rainstorm. Only when Vivian continues to protest does Cay deploy the ultimate Sagittarius seduction move: posting up butt-naked in the object of affection’s hotel bed and saying, “Take your hands out of your pockets and come over here.”
Desert Hearts is widely cited as one of the earliest theatrically released films featuring a WLW romance that doesn’t end with one or both parties dead, ill, locked up, or remorseful. Though a happily-ever-after seems improbable for our heroines with Vivian returning to New York and Cay determined to remain in Reno, the former ultimately delivers a specifically Sagittarian declaration of love at movie’s end.
“Come with me,” she pleads, suddenly unwilling to meet the finality of goodbye. “Ride with me to the next station.”
Skeptical, Cay points out the brevity of the journey. “What is it that you want?” she asks.
Vivian’s want is simple, immediate, and overwhelming: “Another 40 minutes with you.”
That’s it!! And that’s also everything.
Both women beam as Cay, convinced, takes Vivian’s hand to see what the next hour will bring. In the eternal present of a Sagittarian’s mind, continued craving of just 40 more minutes might as well stretch into forever.
The selection of Signature Move may be pushing it as a period piece: other than clothing styles, the only real indicator of time is when the protagonist’s slightly out-of-touch mother approvingly calls Ryan Gosling a “hottie,” which was appropriate for the film’s release in 2017. But it counts for our purposes nonetheless! Capricorns are both a timeless and modern people.
I initially strolled into Showtime’s description of “closeted Muslim lesbian desperately needing to blow off steam becomes a luchadora” expecting to discover an easy fire-sign entry for this piece. Who else would respond to non-verbalized family strife by becoming an amateur theatrical wrestler? Instead, I was confronted with a delightful fictional slice of Capricorn life.
The whole reason that Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza), an immigration lawyer working in Chicago, starts wrestling is because a client who can’t pay her offers recompense in lucha libre lessons. Then she decides to see this absolutely-out-of-left-field training regimen through to the end. That’s how Zaynab finds her way into the art. It’s a whole-ass out-of-nowhere hobby she secretly masters but mentions to no one, as Capricorns often do.
The whole lesbian piece of Signature Move begins when Zaynab walks into a bar and gets seduced by Alma (Sari Sanchez), who turns out to be the daughter of a formerly famous luchadora. Zaynab is alternately sexy, then awkward as fuck, but aside from her handful of communication gaffes with Alma, the primary complication in their burgeoning romance is the presence of Zaynab’s mother, who’s still hoping for a traditional heterosexual marriage.
Alma, who could be read as any number of zodiac sun signs in relationship with a Cap, feels like she’s slowing her pace to match Zaynab’s measured approach. But they’re both wrong! Because when Zaynab signs on to get her ass kicked in a public bout while both Alma and her mother look on, nothing and everything changes going forward. Leaving the match, Zaynab kisses the girl like motherfucking Carey Grant before strutting off to see her mom home at the end.
Compromising everything and nothing for the women in her life, she wins even while losing — and that’s how Capricorns play the game.
Benedetta made its way to this list out of morbid curiosity: I just wanted to see what the now-octogenarian director of Starship Troopers and Showgirls would deliver in a movie about nuns who fuck. It was everything I expected, and then some.
All of the nuns, including Reverend Mother Charlotte Rampling, are runway-ready hotties in the physical mold of Sharon Stone. The plot hinges on a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary being used as a dildo, and Jesus regularly appears to hack up CGI snakes and would-be rapists with a sword in ass-kicking action rescue scenes. For maximum enjoyment, I would recommend fast-forwarding through the torture scenes, as I did — and at 132 minutes the movie doesn’t suffer from losing a little runtime. (I also skipped the scene where Benedetta and her soon-to-be lover Bartolomea take a getting-to-know-you shit together; being scatologically squeamish and not an Aquarius.) Basically, Benedetta is about as blasphemous as you’d expect based on the traditional standards of the Catholic Church, but like its protagonist, seems earnestly convinced of its own spiritual holiness.
That outrageous balance makes Benedetta our entry for Aquarius. Is she fabricating her miracles to gain power within the systems in which she’s confined? Or is she truly the genuine tool of Christ she purports herself to be? In either case, Benedetta buys into her own legend to such a degree that she rejects escape and chooses a bizarro, sort-of happy ending in which plague spares her convent’s city and she lives a long but ultimately lonely life.
“The ways of the Lord are often terrifying,” Benedetta’s confessor informs her early in the movie when she seeks guidance regarding her visions. Quite true, if this movie is to be believed… but also erotic. Does the Lord work through the lesbian fantasies of Paul Verhoeven? That’s an excellent icebreaker question for a first date with an Aquarius.
Carol is typically thought of as a Christmas movie, but it begins and ends during Pisces season with Therese and Carol’s re-meeting as a bookend. The elegant aesthetic of Carol’s Christmas scenes is painted in more of a Piscean gaze than that of seasonally contemporaneous Capricorn. There are long gazes through rain-streaked windows, soft-voiced intensities murmured through swirls of rising cigarette smoke, and the spirit of Carol remains akin to that of a mutable water sign throughout. Pisces always operate at the level of emotional intensity that others typically experience during fraught, family-focused federal holidays.
Carol and Therese initially circle each other with wide eyes, transmitting palpable beams of feeling that transcend the actual words they utter. Therese (Rooney Mara) magnetically follows Carol’s allure away from her doofus boyfriend and toward a greater understanding of herself. Carol, meanwhile, suffers under the covetous possession of her husband. Played by Kyle Chandler with a hard side part, Harge struggles with the thought of losing Cate Blanchett (understandable!), so he manipulates custody of their daughter to bind Carol to him in unwanted commitment (abhorrent!). Harge’s methods of abuse are insidious. When Carol defies his threats to explore her love with Therese, he has their tryst recorded and robs them of their intimacy for blackmail. Carol flees, Therese is heartbroken, Sarah Paulson doles out advice and cigarettes, and everyone passes the winter with shiny eyes full of unshed tears.
The dignity of truth is more powerful than threat, however, and eventually Carol chooses an authentic life over forced repression. When they meet again, Therese refuses to humor Carol with obliging dismissal of her own hurt, but ultimately can’t refuse the desperate plea in Carol’s finally verbalized “I love you.” Returning after yet another attempt at goodbye, Therese watches Carol, seated across the room. Spotting Therese, Carol smiles broadly, and that’s all that needs to be said. The feelings, like those of a Pisces, are too large to be sufficiently communicated in words.
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