Female Gays: Liberation Through Lesbian Misadventure

In the screening series Female Gays: Liberation Through Lesbian Misadventure, Jane Keranen curates an evening of lesbian cinema presented in partnership with the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. This screening is free and open to the public, and reservations are strongly encouraged.

Liberation manifests in myriad and often unexpected forms – in the three accompanying confessional lesbian shorts (Sadie Benning’s Me and Rubyfruit, Cheryl Dunye’s Greetings From Africa, and Jenni Olson’s Blue Diary), we witness the ways in which everyday acts of affection, desire, and confrontation renegotiate and redefine methods of queer liberation.

In Monika Treut’s Virgin Machine, journalist Dorothee Müller (Irina Blum) is adrift as if in a stagnant sea, frustrated with her stalled-out romances (one with a chauvinistic and brutish ex-boyfriend, the other with her effete half-brother), and her terminal, dead-ended research on romantic love. In an attempt to outpace the boredom growing increasingly oppressive at the fringes of her everyday life, she picks herself up, shakes out her chic little haircut, and boards a flight to San Francisco, where she quickly falls into the company of a cadre of sex-positive lesbians. Unburdened by modesty and unaffected by culture shock, she careens with a native confidence through gay nightclubs, strip shows, and titillating same-sex dalliances, recalibrating her sexual self and her romantic potential. Similar to protagonist Dawn in Court Theatre’s new musical Out Here, Dorothee liberates herself from the horrors of the mundane in her pursuance of genuine desire.  

“[Virgin Machine is] A blunt tribute to the not-revolutionary idea that lesbians can be lusty romantic fools just like anybody else.” – Caryn James, The New York Times

Friday, April 3, 2026 | The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E 60th St, Chicago), Room 201 | Doors at 6:30pm I Screening at 7:00pm

Presented in partnership with