Art by Women About Women Making Art About Women

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he first lesbian movie I loved was Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s sumptuous 1994 film starring a young Kate Winslet as a dangerously charismatic schoolgirl who enraptures a sallow classmate with her phantasmagoric fantasy world. In the end, they kill the classmate’s mother. At age fourteen, that squared with my concept of love: predicated on fantasy, eroticized by power imbalance, likely to end in murder—not so much that of anyone’s mother, but more likely of me, by the strength of my own whirling feelings.

A year later, it was The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, Maria Maggenti’s considerably less gothic tale of high school senior Randy (a young, butch Tina from The L Word), who has been sleeping with an older, married woman when she meets Evie, a rich and popular girl who stops at the gas station where Randy works. The movie ends with the two kissing amid a chaotic muddle of class tension, homophobic friends, and angry parents and school administrators. It was a perfect anthem for me at age fifteen, as I had recently begun making out with my rich best friend and was the only out kid in my high school class.

After that came Bound, Chasing Amy, All Over Me, High Art, and But I’m a Cheerleader. I watched and re-watched all of these movies because they showed me myself. Not only because I was queer and prone to phantasmagoric imaginings—as well as to listening to Patti Smith on repeat, wearing stilettos, and heroin addiction—but also because they reflected and suggested my vision of love: as sexy and codependent, forged in opposition to some external conflict. It’s no surprise that both I and the movies I worshiped relied upon a certain kind of high-femme, drug-addled, ambisexual Riot Grrrl iconography. After all, we grew out of the same ’90s post-AIDS homophobia, Cindy Crawford–cum–heroin chic, third-wave feminist stew.

Those types of love are predictable because they are defined by the external circumstances of their stories; their tension depends upon the disapproval of others, and the threat of exile, erasure, or even death. Their object is ultimately not the lover but survival or self-discovery. And that’s fine. For over a century, people have been looking for themselves in love and producing movies about it. It makes a special...