“Not to sound overdramatic about it, but when I first saw Desert Hearts it quite literally changed my life,” says Emma Smart, a film programmer at LGBT London film festival, BFI Flare. When she saw the film for the first time in 1990, aged 14, “My heart did not stop racing from the moment it began to the end of the credits. And after watching it, I finally began to accept my sexuality”.
When it was released in 1986, Donna Deitch’s romantic drama was a gamechanger for a whole generation of lesbians and bisexual women. The only lesbian film to be shown at the first London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now BFI Flare), it’s also generally agreed to be the first film ever made about a lesbian relationship where the romance has a happy ending. Whether or not early viewers knew that the film was making history, its depiction of a torrid 1950s love affair, set in the American west, tended to make a deep impression.
“It’s important to remember that this was pre-internet, pre-lesbians in soaps,” explains Ruth McCarthy, director of queer arts festival Outburst, who first saw Desert Hearts a few years after it had come out. “Representation and visibility were minimal.