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Spike lee’s booty-bumpin’ lesbian sex thang
The director’s new film takes a surprising view of dyke love

By Rachel Kramer Bussel
Friday, July 23, 2004

When Spike Lee’s new film “She Hate Me” opens on Wednesday, July 28, viewers will have the chance to see 19 self-identified lesbians, most of them women of color, on the big screen. This is a huge step, certainly, but is it a positive one?

Already causing a stir within the queer community, the film is sure to provoke viewers of all persuasions — but especially lesbians — with its over-the-top queer plotline.

“She Hate Me” tells the story of John Henry “Jack” Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), a buppie ruined by an Enron-type scandal, who agrees to inseminate his ex-girlfriend, Fatima (Kerry Washington), now a lesbian, and her partner, Alex (Dania Ramirez), in exchange for cold hard cash.

Soon, Jack finds himself in the enviable position of servicing wealthy (and gorgeous) lesbians. The film follows Jack as he impregnates 17 other women, while getting more deeply entangled in the lives of the glamorous-looking Fatima and Alex. Viewers, meanwhile, are treated to two lesbian sex scenes and a montage of Jack having sex with several women, which is played up for laughs as they navigate this unfamiliar territory.

The other queer twist here is that Spike Lee hired the well-known lesbian author and sex educator Tristan Taormino as a “technical consultant.” For what she called “Lesbian Boot Camp,” Taormino provided a crash course in dyke life via readings, panel discussions, individual meetings and outings to bars such as Meow Mix and Lovergirl.

Taormino, who writes a sex column in the Village Voice, also consulted with Lee on the script and was present on the set during filming of scenes involving lesbian characters. Taormino also organized six nationwide screenings of the film for lesbian media honchos. The film has already prompted vehement reactions from many of them.

R. Erica Doyle, a poet of Trinidadian descent, sees the film as a complete male fantasy of lesbians. “The lesbians of color are shown in great variety — butch, femme, aggressive, timid, different sizes, racial backgrounds. Although they are portrayed as being various, and not necessarily stereotypical, most of these women serve only to propel the story line which is really about a heterosexual African-American man,” Doyle said. “I think the portrayal of the lesbians in this movie is extremely harmful and lacking in complexity. The film implies, erroneously, that the only way to get pregnant is through ‘natural’ sexual intercourse with a man, thereby privileging heterosexual sex.”

Taormino counters that lesbians face a variety of options for getting pregnant. “ I can appreciate when lesbians say that they feel like they don’t see themselves, their lives, or their realities represented in this film, but I don’t think it is meant to represent all lesbians of color, all upwardly-mobile dykes, all lesbian moms, etc.,” she said.

“No movie can do that,” she added. “The truth is that when lesbians want to parent, they’ve got options: adoption, artificial insemination, a friend’s sperm and a turkey baster or sex.”

Taormino said she personally knows lesbians who have had sex with a man in order to get pregnant. She admits she has never heard of parties where five of them do it with the same guy in one night.

“It is a movie, and that was Spike’s vision,” she adds. “I was willing to ‘go there’ with the script and with Spike to see the issues that it raised.”

But African-American author Rosalind Lloyd, who appreciated Lee’s vision of lesbianism and black female sexuality in “She’s Gotta Have It,” was disappointed. “Real, authentic lesbians will not sleep with men, for any reason at all,” she said. “Spike is obviously striving to achieve wider appeal by portraying this much in the same way we’ve been bombarded with heterosexual sex scenes during the first season of ‘The L Word.’”

Lloyd cited “the obvious fine line between exploitation and visibility for us as lesbians and lesbians of color in this film.”

For Claire Cavanah as well, co-founder of Toys in Babeland, the film’s portrayal of lesbians is the same old male fantasy.

“Spike Lee takes artistic license with the idea of the lesbian baby boom and writes sex with Jack into every lesbian’s part,” she said. “That just exposes his lack of real knowledge about lesbians.”

Cavanah does praise the film’s ending, which shows a reconciliation among the major characters, including Jack’s father. She said the last shot “was one of those instances when a film refuses to bend to the director’s will and instead is true to life. Jack, his father and the two lesbians on the beach with their babies looked so much like what many alternative families look like, it could have been an ad for lesbian families.”

Taormino agrees with this more progressive take.

“At the very end of the film, Spike purposely leaves the Jack-Fatima-Alex relationship ambiguous,” she said. “It’s clear that the three are all co-parenting the kids, and Fatima and Alex are very much a couple. But it’s not clear what their relationship to Jack is. To me, the end is a radical vision of our future, a future where the heterosexual nuclear two-parent family is not the dominant model.”

For Samiya Bashir, editor of “Best Black Women’s Erotica II,” this ambiguity doesn’t make up for the unrealistic portrayals throughout the film.

“I don’t subscribe to the idea that any publicity is good publicity. The majority of the lesbians tend to fit into the model of male-fantasy,” she said. “Additionally, the group of women who are not ultra-feminine are used as a joke. They too are not real people. They are ‘manly’ in a way that is completely unrepresentative of butch-identified lesbians. These women are instead representative of the aversion of the male gaze to any idea of lesbian that doesn’t fit into the aforementioned lesbian-sex-fantasy model.”

While all of the women I spoke to were critical of the film, a few saw at least a sliver of a silver lining.

“Maybe, somehow, this movie will get a conversation started amongst people who are not talking about lesbians of color,” Doyle said. “But again, this movie is not about acceptance or tolerance. It is about how one man searches for his humanity in a society where even reproduction is propelled by greed.

“Somehow,” she added, “in the middle of that, Spike Lee inserts an extensive male fantasy of having sex with lots of women — women who are usually inaccessible to most men. If only he could have told this important story without selling out his sisters.”

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