The making of Lesbian Visibility Day
It was important to us to reclaim Lesbian Visibility Day that had been taken over the past years by men who claim to be “lesbians”. Men cannot be lesbians, as “lesbian” designates female homosexuals, adult human female who are homosexuals.
At the beginning of the project, it was clear to us that we wanted to promote the usage of the word “lesbian” and its positive connotations and not use the word “queer”. We also wanted to fight back against male attempts to invade our spaces. We wanted to make a speech or a declaration. The form of the project finally centered around making a video. One of us proposed to contact Vaishnavi Sundar who has made several films promoting women’s rights. We invited Vaishnavi to join one of our calls. It was clear that her enthusiasm and vision of integrating lesbian archives in the video to tell a little bit of our history made us choose her for the creation and editing of our video. Our Australian colleague had collected photos from lesbian archives and shared them with us. A woman in the USA also shared some photos, and I had some as well.
We needed to raise funds to pay the job of video editing and we started to mention this video project to our friends. Women got enthusiastic and through word of mouth we managed to raise enough funds.
We had several calls before deciding what to say. Each woman had 20 seconds to say something, starting with “I am a lesbian” then say something positive about being a lesbian. At the beginning we were 3, but we soon became 10 and finally 15 women took part to the project. We were careful to integrate a diversity of age, style and ethnicity in the video. Different women from 12 different countries appeared in the video. Even though we all speak different languages, we opted to all use English.
Vaishnavi sent us tips on how to film ourselves using our smartphones. One woman needed to redo her video as she had filmed themselves too close to the phone. A woman’s video could not be used, as she was constantly moving! Another woman needed to resent her video as she had spoken Portuguese instead of English. It was a harssle chasing the women to get the videos on time, but we managed!
Vaishnavi did a wonderful job in mixing the different speech on an energetic music and dynamic editing. We all loved the final result! When we showed the video as a preview at our LGB International meeting in London, several of us broke into tears as this was exactly the message we hoped to give on Lesbian Visibility Day, and not the views of “men claiming to be women”.
It was fun coordinating this project and a honor to be part of the movement that dares to reclaim lesbian culture after years of “queer” colonization.
Catherine, LGB Alliance Switzerland