At first, I knew them only by their lips.
In 1997, Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly were nominated for an MTV Movie Award. As lovers in the Wachowskis’ Bound (1996), their sultry, urgent romance—blood warm lust lusciously consummated, but never, no never, satiated—garnered a nod for “Best Kiss.” They didn’t win, and I don’t know what I would have done if they did, maybe walked through the neighborhood for hours, letting Tori Amos pour into my ears through my Walkman as I wondered what it was precisely that I couldn’t forget. As it was, the flake of footage MTV broadcast that evening entirely unspooled me. According to my muddy memory it’s a dark scene, two lips, near-disembodied by way of closeup, but indelibly feminine, list towards one another with hesitant, breathy excitement: at twelve, I thought that perhaps this was a sign of nervousness because at that tender age I understood sexuality in terms of trepidation and shame.
Now I know the specificity of that sort of erotic union: you’re impatient—so impatient—and yet you protract the wait, the build up, just a little bit because you realize the impossibility of both fully experiencing something and keeping it, too. The moment you hand yourself over to any moment, you succumb to its transience. And so, you force yourself to tarry, bending towards what you want, but slowly, slowly. Not just yet, you tell yourself. You self-impose that incandescent torture hoping that, perhaps, the pleasure will crystallize. It never does. How many ways do we try to safeguard our bliss? To return to it? Perhaps it’s folly, to wait for the kiss.
Because I was twelve at the time, I caught this glimpse of Gershon and Tilly covertly—I wasn’t really allowed to watch MTV, and if my father had walked in while I was watching the contenders for “Best Kiss,” he absolutely would have changed the channel. Probably I was so frightened of being caught watching this program that I turned it off myself, an exercise in self-monitoring that came of absorbing my family’s taut discipline. And while I desperate to learn more about this movie—Bound—I discerned from that fleeting scene that I would never be permitted to rent it. I’m not sure, in fact, when I learned what Gershon and Tilly looked like, when they became more to me than two tremulous lips, yearning. But eventually, I saw a promotional poster.
It hardly took a glance before I determined that Gina Gershon should always win Best Kiss by default, that her lips—the slant and slope of them, the insouciant roundness—disqualify every other pair of lips in perpetuity. Pair them with a shaggy soft butch haircut, and how’s a girl expected to keep it together? I did not, at this point in time, realize that I was bisexual, which is, in retrospect, hilarious to me. I was head over heals for Gershon’s Corky years before I saw the movie, and after I finally did it required every ounce of restraint not to watch it again, each day, for the rest of my life. It’s easier than it might otherwise be for me to summon this moderation because the film is quite violent, and I always struggle with that.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tilly and Gershon discuss the artfulness of Bound’s love scenes, of the pains the Wachowskis took to get them right, and of how they manage to eschew the male gazey depictions of lesbianism that have loomed large in media. I was an adult when I finally watched the movie. I had, gradually, stockpiled a list of romantic films, many of them focused on queer women’s narratives, that I was determined to watch as soon as I was at liberty to do as I pleased. And when I did—when I watched Bound and But I’m A Cheerleader and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love—I both recognized a colossal physiological want and performed herculean mental gymnastics to suppress that want, or at least to contort it into a different, easier narrative. To this day I’m not sure why. I always told myself that if I were queer, coming out would be comparatively easy for me because I was ensconced in the liberal enclave of my college and surrounded by empathic, broad-thinking people in both the English department and the Women’s Studies department. Yet I was queer and, clearly, I was too afraid to come out. Instead, I repackaged my queerness as academic curiosity. I took courses like Lesbian Fictions and a seminar on Virginia Woolf. I sought out charged female intimacies in the literary milieu that most interested me: Victorian England. I discerned my various crushes on women and pressed that recognition down—down—down. I watched Bound and dreamed of being Corky’s Violet.
Perhaps I’m not the right person to make this assertion, but I’m fairly certain that most people who are interested in sex, whatever their inclinations, would consider Bound supremely sexy. It is, after all, a fantasy of sorts: catching a glimpse of someone beautiful in an elevator and then, suddenly, taking them to bed.
Can you imagine? Pause, for a moment, and think of how you’d react if you were awaiting an elevator and suddenly the doors opened to reveal a swaggering Corky—and she lived in your building! I would be forced to either marry her or to move, there would be no mediating option.
It’s either cruel or brilliant that Corky and Violet never actually have sex in their building’s elevator. An elevator is, after all, the classic mechanism for accelerated erotic tension: the quarters are tight, and your solitude is brief in an undetermined sort of way—when will the other person exit? And will somebody else hop on, thereby harpooning that crackling, lusty womb? And if someone does, well, how dare they?
But then again, the Wachowskis, Tilly, and Gershon supply us with so many gifts over the course of the film, perhaps I’m wrong to wish for more. Pride Month has made me greedy, maybe. What I can say with certainty is that I am grateful to be safely out—I know this is not a luxury available to everyone—and grateful that I now watch queer films with full appreciation of what they inspire in me. I never met my own Corky, or my own Graham—a moment, please, for Graham:
Still, there is freedom in knowing, fully, without misdirection or sublimation or clipping at the edges, what we want.