Lesvia. Directed by Tzeli Hadjidimitriou. The Film Collaborative, 2024. 77 minutes.

Womontown. Directed by Sandy Woodson. PBS, 2022. 27 minutes.

What is lesbian culture? How can lesbians and students of gender and sexuality studies learn about lesbian histories? Recently, the cultural drive to preserve and record lesbian people’s lives and communities—as evidenced in A Secret Love (2020) or Surviving the Silence (2020)—has shifted to focus on lesbian spaces and the people who inhabited them, such as in the series The Lesbian Bar Project (2022) and Rebel Dykes (2021).1 The films in this review build on the latter trend, exploring the role of space in constituting social identities by documenting lesbians through spaces of living and travel.

Beginning in the late 1970s and spanning into the second decade of the 2000s, Lesvia tells the story of Skala Eressos, a beach town with farming roots on the island of Lesbos, Greece, where lesbians vacationed and lived. Using photos and film from each decade, director Tzeli Hadjidimitriou also embeds her own story of being from Lesbos and participating in the Eressos culture of lesbians. This film moves through these decades, illustrating how women from numerous countries (among them Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Italy) gathered and created community.

One important space where women could be together communally was the beach. Viewers encounter this through footage of the lesbian version of the International Olympics set against the backdrop of the ocean. In these games, women competed against each other based on country of origin in team sports such as swimming, soccer, and tug of war. The beach was an important site for camping and gathering, as well. Lesbians also spent time in the small downtown area in Eressos, but being in town meant interacting with locals, which could introduce tensions. Some of the Greek residents felt the women were not spending enough money as tourists, and others were hostile, fearing that lesbians holding hands in public would influence children. These dynamics shifted a bit in the 1990s, with the opening of the lesbian-owned Hotel Sappho and the Tenth Muse (a bar and restaurant) on the town square. Through these businesses and other actions like caring for local stray cats and dogs, lesbians became more interconnected with the local community and experienced more tolerance. The film depicts these changing attitudes by interviewing the Greek residents and showing that some local women joined walking groups with lesbians. At the end of the film, younger lesbians are interviewed and express a desire to learn from their lesbian ancestors about their lives, thus signaling a need for this film and for stories of other lesbian and women-only spaces to be told.

Where Lesvia documents an intentional lesbian community over five decades, Womontown encapsulates a five-year period, 1990-95, focusing on a neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. It was within a twelve-square block where partners Drea and Mary Ann chose to live, and they recruited other lesbians to buy homes or rent there. The idea was to have a concentrated community of lesbians in a space that was safe and economically viable at present and for the future. The founders attended festivals and put an ad in Lesbian Connection to promote their “deliberate urban lesbian community.”2 Filmmaker Sandy Woodson, like Hadjidimitriou, relies heavily on interviews, featuring numerous lesbians who lived in Womontown to encapsulate their experiences. Interviewees discuss potlucks; using the Dutch Hill Flags as a signal for other lesbians that wouldn’t alarm non-lesbian locals; and the need to appeal to lesbians only, not gay men, to move to Womontown.3 In Womontown’s 5-year existence, 75 womyn purchased 28 homes and 14 apartment buildings, and at its height, there were 80 womyn living in the Dutch Hill–Longfellow neighborhood.

Reflecting on the ways these films document community, culture, and identity, I think numerous courses would benefit from incorporating them. Classes on gender, sexuality, cultural rhetorics, and identity could use these films to discuss how identity, community, and conflicts about sexuality shift through time. Additionally, Lesvia would fit nicely into a course on gender in a global perspective. Finally, while many historical separatist spaces such as women’s/womyn’s lands were located outside of urban life, Womontown demonstrates how political thought and social action can be adapted to live in a city space.

1For additional films on recording lesbian lives see El Chenier’s review of Old Lesbians and A Secret Love in this issue of Films for the Feminist Classroom as well as Cait McKinney’s review of All We’ve Got and The Archivettes in issue 10.2 and an interview with the filmmakers of Old Lesbians in issue 12.2.

2Lesbian Connection is the longest running lesbian journal, founded in 1976 by the Ambitious Amazons. The publication is still in circulation today.

3The Dutch Hill flag initially stood for the Dutch Hill neighborhood in Kansas City but was appropriated by the lesbians in Womontown as the “unofficial” symbol of their neighborhood (Wallington 2024).

Sarah Cooper (PhD), is an assistant professor of cultural rhetorics and professional writing at Colorado State University. Her interdisciplinary research resides at the intersection of archives, rhetoric, gender and queer theory, and sexuality studies. Most recently, her research appears in the Journal of Lesbian Studies. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Permanent Marker (Paper Nautilus, 2020) and 89% (Clemson University Press, 2022).