An Obscure Lesbian Classic
“Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain” — A ‘90s Movie through WLW Spectacles
In 1995, Universal Pictures and Buena Vista Visual Effects released the film Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain, starring two famous actors from the 1990s. The film tells the story of Beth (played by Christina Ricci, The Addams Family & Casper) and Jody (played by Anna Chlumsky, My Girl), two girls from different social classes who live with single mothers and embark on an adventure inspired by a legendary woman named Molly Morgan. In the process, they not only denounce domestic violence, but also the criminal justice system that enables it.
A feature I could only find out about through a post on Tumblr that talked about a “blatant lesbian subtext” — a plot element that would only have been understandable in the 90s, due to the aftermath of the film production code prohibiting explicit queer characters.
Over the years, I’ve seen a number of films from the 80s and 90s. This is mainly due to the influence of my stepmother, who introduced me to all the films she watched growing up during that time. The Goonies was one of her favourite films. As much as I loved the films from my childhood, there was something about that time period of movies. They felt much less sanitised and sheltered than today’s family films. For example, the kids could swear, talk about sex, drugs and domestic violence etc like it was no big deal. I liked almost all of them. Willow and Drop Dead Fred were two particular films from that era that I watched countless times. As well as My Girl, although I had my issues with it.
My Girl introduced me to Anna Chlumsky, who I absolutely loved in this role. She brought such a unique and boisterous energy to her character Vada. And considering this was her first role at such a young age, I thought she was quite impressive. She was also one of the only tomboy characters I knew as a child. So when the tragedy happened and she lost her male best friend, the audience saw her “prettied up” in a dress at the end of the film — I remember I felt a little out of place.
Regardless of how small this gesture is, many films and television programmes from this period — 1980s to early 2000s — tended to show this. The masculine presenting woman undergoes some sort of makeover to make her look “prettier” or perhaps gets a boyfriend. One of the many examples of this is Charlotte’s Web, where the main girl falls for a boy and starts to dress more feminine as a sign that she is “growing up” and evolving. Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with that. Its just at the time (I was 12/13 years old when I first saw My Girl), many people told me that my masculinity was just a phase that I would inevitably grow out of.
When I was 9 or 10 years old, I even bet my cousin £5.00 that I would not become girly after the first few months in high school. When I was that age and high school was almost four months behind me, I reminded her of the bet, “You owe me £5.00,” because I never forgot it. And she replied, “Wait a year. Then you’ll be a girly then” A whole three years went by. I finished high school. And I realised that all these people, including my cousin, weren’t right at all. They were just rude.
I think all of this can also be applied to my queerness, which I immediately shoved into a corner the moment I entered middle school because everyone around me had crushes and was into ‘dating”. And of course, I had no idea or knowledge that this identity even existed until high school. It really would have helped because with some of the crushes I had, I thought I was doing the “impossible” at the time. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain is the film that best captures that “feeling” of my queer childhood.
“Ten years old, I was settled in the butter-saturated dark of a movie theatre, eagerly watching Christina Ricci — in her oft-overlooked turn in 1995’s Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain. I was watching her, or rather her character, fall in love.”
As much as Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain is billed as an action-packed adventure story for the whole family, in which ‘two girls set out to find gold in the mountain and discover that the real treasure is the power of friendship’, the adventure aspect ironically takes a back seat to focus on the relationship between the two female leads. The main questions in this film aren’t ‘Where is the gold?’, “How do we get there?’ or ‘What stands in the way of the mission?’ Rather, “How can this budding relationship survive when the whole world is trying to tear it apart?
The two girls meet twice in typical meet-cute way. The first time, Beth spies Jody -who is unaware of her class difference — in “slow motion” across the street. The second time, Beth nearly runs Jody over with her bike, leading to a romantically coded ‘bad first impression’ between the two.
Funnily enough, despite her first impression, Jody is attracted to Beth because the next time the audience sees her, she teasingly throws berries from a tree at Beth and begins to recite lines from Winnie the Pooh, which Beth repeats to her surprise. The two girls who are with Beth tell her that Jody is ‘trashy” and that it would be dangerous to befriend her. So their friendship is starcrossed from the start, and the adventure to find the ‘gold in the mountain’ could be seen as the two girls’ escape from a society that doesn’t accept them. At one point, the two are even separated from their parents, whereupon Beth declares in a romantic speech: “You can keep us apart for the rest of our lives, but nothing you say will ever change the way I feel about her.”
The film portrays Jody as incredibly masculine and androgynous. When Beth first sees her, she’s portrayed as a ‘boy” fighting with another boy. It seemed like the filmmakers wanted the audience to see most of the scenes between Jody and Beth on the same level as an ordinary viewer would with a boy and a girl. The fact that the typical coding for lesbian relationships is “butch and femme” reinforced this.
The queer coding of this film is even hinted at through the flashbacks of Molly Morgan, the legendary woman Jody worships throughout the film, who is described as independent and strong-willed -she even disguises herself as a boy.
Over the course of Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain, the viewer sees how Beth learns to be more outspoken, and how Jody learns to open up. And since the film is narrated by an older version of Beth, it’s reasonable to assume that the relationship the two girls form in this film will be a long-lasting one.
As many viewers have rightly noticed in recent years, there are hardly any films where it’s just two girls “hanging out” It’s still a rarity for two women to be the leads without any petty back and forth or any romantic interests taking centre stage. It’s all about them and their relationship. My honest opinion on this is that I see the real crisis in male and female friendships, where two people of the opposite sex can’t seem to spend five minutes on screen or in any piece of media without something romantic being implied. But the latter is still true.
“From a really young age, girls are exposed to media that frames deep steadfast relationships between girls as immature like they are secondary to the marriage that you’re going to have with a dude. So your’e taught really early on to view the real relationships you have with other women as secondary to a hypothetical one that you are bound to have in the future: this inevitable husband figure is going to come and supersede the girlfriends you have in importance.” — Sweating over this super weird part of When Marnie Was There for 20 minutes
This does add to the initial gayness of this film — the fact there is a lack of ‘interpolated male love interests’ a rarity for a 90s film — as there is a point in the film where Beth leaves two boys to hug Jody. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain reads to me at times overtly like a queer coming-of-age romance, something I’ve never seen in a family film. Whenever I’ve seen the depiction of women loving women, it’s been teenagers or adults. And while the portrayal of young lesbian love has gotten better since the release of My First Summer, I still haven’t seen a lesbian relationship that isn’t sexualised in some way or isn’t aimed at an older audience. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain is the closest film I’ve seen to “puppy love” in a lesbian relationship, especially when the target audience is families.
The way society portrays queerness, in my personal experience at a young age, is that it’s something you outgrow in order to grow up. Another classic from the 90s, Boy Meets World, had a similar plot where one of the main conflicts in the main protagonists’ (Cory and Shawn) relationship was the fear of growing up and getting girlfriends and their “friendship” never being the same after that.
Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain surprisingly does the opposite. It allows its two young female protagonists to develop without them having to leave their queer childhood behind and take on an unavoidable “husband figure”.
Jody, for example, is allowed to become more vulnerable without conforming to society’s ideas of femininity. She’s allowed to retain her masculinity and her girlfriend, rather than the narrative straight washing her and alluding to future male interest so that she becomes “mature”.
“At its base, Gold Diggers is a pleasant but unremarkable film in which two white girls, one deeply impoverished, search for legendary gold, surmounting some not inconsiderable obstacles — a vicious subplot of domestic abuse is woven into the narrative — and cultivating a keen friendship along the way. It was the friendship that enchanted me; it seemed more remarkable, and more rare, than buried treasure.” — LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: ON CHRISTINA RICCI AND QUEER ’90S NOSTALGIA
Taken on its own (as mentioned above), Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain doesn’t particularly stand out from the golden film era of the 90s. The title itself hasn’t aged well at all. As an action/adventure film, The Goonies naturally surpasses it for many viewers. But as a queer romance? It remains one of the most memorable and beloved films from the 90s, and something I wish I’d seen when I was younger — instead of most of the straight, family-friendly content I was exposed to.
Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain DVD is Available to Purchase on Amazon.
