A Brief History of the Piper Perabo Lesbian Cinematic Universe
Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. It’s been fifteen years since the first and last time I saw Léa Pool’s 2001 “Lost and Delirious” — an experience that at the time was so distressing I vowed to never repeat it. Well, at now nearly twenty-eight in a world that no longer forces me to search the wild west of mid-2000s YouTube for queer content, I’ve decided its time to call a truce.
Mouse poised over the play button, I could remember little from my initial viewing, but the following stood out in my mind: Shakespeare, enduring sadness, and Ani DiFranco. Her song “You Had Time” featured in the film, and then my iPod for years following the introduction. What I found upon my second viewing was so much more.
“Lost and Delirious” with its 51-percent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes isn’t winning any awards, but in the fledgling world of lesbian cinema, it is a triumph. The film, based on Susan Swan’s 1993 novel “The Wives of Bath,” is a perfect cross-section of queer life in its era — and therefore, properly evocative of its trauma. There was no light at the end of the tunnel yet. No “L Word” — Real, Q, or otherwise — and “The Price of Salt” was not yet “Carol.” Not even Willow Rosenberg (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) had come out of the closet yet when Susan Swan put pen to paper, and at the film’s release Ellen had been excommunicated, yet to land firmly on her feet again with “Finding Nemo” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
In the world outside entertainment, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton had just signed the now-infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy into law, banning LGBT Americans from military service. That was 1993. Three years later, he signed the Defense Against Marriage Act. In Canada — Swan’s home country — marriage equality was passed in 2005. However, in the years preceding the release of the book and its adaptation, legislators failed to extend human rights protections to LGBT Canadians — most notably, in the creation of the Canadian Human Rights Act (later amended). Marriage equality was extended to LGBT Americans a decade later in 2015.
It must be noted: the book is markedly set in 1963, a reflection of the author’s youth. In 1967, the Supreme Court of Canada sentenced a gay man, Everett Klippert, to life in prison as a sex offender. He served four years and was posthumously pardoned by current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016.
All of this — generations of oppression and trauma past — creates the world in which “Lost and Delirious” is set.
If you’ve not caught a glimpse in the last twenty years, the story is told from the perspective of Mary, an innocent new student at an all-girls boarding school located in nondescript seclusion — or you might recognize her as a pre-“OC” Mischa Barton. The first time she catches her new roommates making out on the roof, she assumes they are practicing for boys. When she later wakes up to them sharing a bed, she knows the truth.
Her new roommates are, of course: Piper Perabo as Pauline, or Paulie for short (read: gay) and Victoria (Jessica Paré). Again, Tori for short. Paulie cares more about Tori than any rules that may be enforced. She smokes, her uniform is never worn properly, and she spikes the punch in her first few moments on screen. Tori is her opposite; her answer to Paulie’s devil-may-care attitude is the knowledge that yes, he does care and she, therefore, must toe the line.
For Paulie, disconnected from her adoptive parents and birth mother, Tory is all she has (spare Mary and a rescued falcon) — and her anger about that bubbles just beneath the surface. She certainly doesn’t have any sense of belonging in a world that abandoned her before her first birthday, so what’s the point of pretending? Rage more.
The girls’ romance is passionate and invokes all the nostalgia of first love, a time when every emotion is an infinite depth. This, though, is their downfall. They get caught. Tori finds the perfect scapegoat: a boyfriend…and Paulie finds, well, madness. The acute mania that Piper Perabo captures is gut-wrenching in its tragedy and realism. In the end, Paulie jumps to her death beside the raptor she mothered back from injury. It seems not that she intended to die, but rather to prove to her lost love that she was better than any man — for she could fly. “Paulie!” screams Tory in agony. The movie is over.
It goes without saying that the film is still as undeniably sad as I recalled. But it is a different sadness than fifteen years ago when — like Paulie — my young gay world was filled with news of strangers trying to legislate me out of existence. The world is no longer one of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and marriage equality debates pivoting around the Prop 8 campaign. (Well, okay, maybe it’s not that different. As I write this, it has been made illegal for trans youth to seek healthcare in Arkansas — and there is proposed or anti-transgender legislation in 32 states, according to Freedom For All Americans’ legislative tracker.)
Instead, it is the sadness of a life lived amongst the impacts of systemic discrimination. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults are twice as likely to experience mental illness than heterosexuals, whereas transgender individuals are four times more likely than their cisgender peers. Suicidality and depression are also twice as common in LGB youth; and for trans youth, it appears twice as often than it does in LGB youth who are cisgender.
As I look back into my own past on screen, I see a mirror in Paulie’s teachers. The two women, rumored to be lesbians, are desperate to help stop Paulie’s whirlwind path of self-destruction as the teen romance implodes before their eyes. Paulie insists that they couldn’t possibly understand, couldn’t help, but in one final olive branch Ms. Vaughn (Jackie Burroughs) says meaningfully, “Yes, Paulie, I think I know.” And so do we. We have seen friends, lovers, acquaintances, and icons battle demons of ostracism and shame that we know they may not overcome time and again; a gauntlet that trains queer youth to be amateur trauma therapists before they are old enough to legally drink. (Though, they are weary enough to be addicts.)
It is for all of these reasons that, despite its harsh critical reception, “Lost and Delirious” has endured as a cult classic for the lesbian community.
It defined a genre.
“Lost and Delirious” is not the first movie of its kind. 1931 saw the advent of the boarding school lesbian genre with “Machden in Uniform” but “Lost and Delirious” is the first that was recognizably paralleled. “Loving Annabelle” (2006) from its poetry to its characters reads like fanfiction — teacher/student future fic AU: Tori has been living a boring happy, and most importantly, straight life since Paulie died. Then, she meets Annabelle.
Simone Bradley (Diane Giadry) is a live-in English teacher at an all-girls Catholic boarding school, under the watchful and homophobic eye of her aunt. She assigns Walt Whitman poems to her students between her busy schedule of pining for her dead ex-girlfriend and bad sex with her boyfriend. Annabelle (Erin Kelly) is the daughter of a Senator and the latest addition to her classroom, one last Hail Mary — literally — before military school. Like Paulie, she smokes and breaks rules without a care in the world. Their messy uniforms are near-identical. Annabelle also appears to be one of the only people in Simone’s new straight life who knows about her ex-girlfriend’s suicide. Sound familiar?
They eventually — against all better rational and legal advice — fall in love and bed. It doesn’t work out, of course. Then, there’s “Bloomington” (2010), a continuation of the series. Actress-turned-student (Sarah Stouffer) who hates her momager falls for an orphaned college professor (Allison McAtee) known for having affairs with her students. There are no uniforms but the themes are the same. It’s Lesbian Mommy Issue Cinema.
These films were not the only ones springboarded by “Lost and Delirious.” If you look closely enough, Piper Perabo’s 2001 queer debut is the epicenter of the lesbian cinematic universe.
The six degrees of Piper Perabo
Okay, let’s start with an easy one. “Imagine Me & You.” The classic 2005 film in its current iteration would not exist without “Lost and Delirious” solidifying Perabo as an actor willing to play gay. (“Imagine Me & You”’s even lower 34-percent Rotten Tomatoes rating is a criminal offense in most Girl in Red concert audiences.)
Beyond that, there’s Mischa Barton. Two years after the film’s release, she was cast as Marissa Cooper on “The OC” where she went on to make out with Olivia Wilde to the delight of queer millennials everywhere. Then, there’s Mimi Kuzyk (Eleanor Bannet) who later appeared in lesbian favorites “The L Word,” “Bomb Girls,” and “Lost Girl.” “Lost Girl” was of course created by Emily Andras, followed by “Wynonna Earp” of which Perabo is a fan. Even the school gardener (Graham Greene) in Pool’s 2001 film is connected to Kristen Stewart via the “Twilight” saga.
Perabo can be linked to queer media and entertainers — like Alyson Stoner, “Carol,” Demi Lovato, “Disobedience,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” or even Sarah Paulson — with minimal effort. This begs the question: does Piper Perabo know she’s the center of the lesbian cinematic universe?
