This is a very personal story for filmmaker Kathryn L Beranich as she was part of a small group of lesbians in the small city of Roanoke, Virginia who socialised together in the 1980’s. There were huge feminist movements elsewhere in the USA but for the most part these mainly white privileged closeted women were focused only on exploring their sexuality.
In this macho Reagan era these women who were attracted to the rural area of the Roanoke Valley found great delight in discovering other women like themselves. At first their only opportunity for socializing was a scruffy basement gay bar where they were expected to sign in and where there was little chance of any fruitful encounters .
However there was a local restaurant run by two women ran who were persuaded to set aside their venue once a month for a ‘private party’ for a burgeoning group of lesbians to meet. It gained its name ‘The First Friday’ as that is how often the group met, and there were so paranoid about being discovered they didn’t want anything to give away the real nature of their meetings.
These were pure social events as even if the world outside had a political agenda these women simply wanted a bolt holt to meet other lesbians. Then when the night was over most of them went back to their solitary lives in the ‘straight world’ Some even to their husbands.
Beranich’s low budget film pieces it together with archival footage and a series of talking head interviews with several women who had been part of the group and were eager to share that this period had been highlights of their lives. Some of their accounts funnily added to myths about lesbians…….one dressed up in her best girly party clothes to discover all the other women were dressed in flannel plaids.
The meetings morphed into camping weekends which only existed if they didn’t tell the landowners that they were lebsians,. Sadly when they tried to be open about their true nature with a Women Owned Campsite they were rejected flat out.
However without a formal leadership in the group itself the group seem to dissipate when they couldn’t agree on the slightest thing, let alone a way to move forward. So eventually it fell apart especially as the next generation of lesbians were much more open about their sexuality and lifestyles and their political aspirations.
To the women who were there, this is a happy trip down memory lane, but this will probably not mean much at all to the rest of the LGBT community. It has little significance on the story of our own history .
(PS This film is being streamed by Out On Film Virtual Film Festival )
Labels: 2020, documentary, lesbian
