This post by Ren Jender appears as part of The Terror of Little Girls Theme Week.
I used to not understand why so many queer people disliked coming out stories in films, literature, and TV, but now I do. Because, as important as coming out stories are to the community, they are not the only stories–not even along with their flip-side: queer-bashing stories–the community has to tell, a fact casual observers wouldn’t realize watching most queer characters in movies and on television. The omission isn’t because real-life queer people haven’t led interesting lives, but because screenwriters, when adapting real-life queer people’s stories, have cut the queer right out of the script. This phenomenon is not a relic of the distant past: last year’s film about the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, had no mention of her long-term relationship with a woman. This year’s much anticipated bio-pic about WWII codebreaker Alan Turing who was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of “homosexuality” and was then forced to undergo “chemical castration” as punishment–and went on to kill himself as a result–includes little enough of his identity as a gay man that even straight critics have noticed.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a BBC production from 25 years ago, adapted by author Jeanette Winterson and based on her own autobiographical novel, is one of the few films in theaters or on TV which contains both a coming-out story and another parallel, equally compelling story. Seven-year-old, red-haired “Jess” (played as a young child by Emily Aston and as a teen by Charlotte Coleman) grows up in a small town in Lancashire, in the north of England, with her strict Pentecostal adoptive parents; her father, always in the background, is silent and her mother (Geraldine McEwan), front and center, quotes the Bible and denouncing the “heathens” all around her.
The TV film, directed by Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), and scored by Rachel Portman (who has composed for many films, Belle is one of the most recent), captures a world of women. Jess’s mother is one of several middle-aged and older “ladies” in unfashionable 1950s-style suits and hats (the action starts around 1968) who are the backbone of the church. The pastor is the only man of note in nearly three hours of run-time: Jess’s father is present throughout her childhood, but he’s either sleeping (he works the night shift) or looking on with raised eyebrows but no other comment while Jess’s mother embarks on her latest project (equipping the house with an indoor toilet, painting all the house interiors, traveling to another town to minister to the sick or gathering Jess’s books to burn them). The father is so hesitant to speak that in a scene toward the end several of the characters are startled to hear him say a quiet “Amen.”
The terror in Oranges is the terror of the family. Children don’t have any choice in who raises them and until they leave home they are, to some degree, at the mercy of their parents. Fruit also exposes the terror of religious fanaticism. Jess’s mother sees sin and evil everywhere except in the church and with “the redeemed”–which is why she keeps her daughter out of school until she’s 7. The pastor takes the idea of hellfire so literally that he keeps a fire extinguisher in the van he uses to preach in other towns. They see The Devil in everything different from their own insular world, the church and their beliefs. Their perception of “a demon” in the teenaged Jess seems inevitable.
But Fruit frames fanaticism and not religious belief as the problem. Jess is close to an 80-something church lady, Elsie, (Margery Withers) who shows her many kindnesses. And the church and Jess’s sincere beliefs (which shine through Coleman’s radiant face when she talks about Jesus) gives her (and author Winterson, who published the book when she was 24) a confidence that is rare for women and girl characters in films and TV. When the pastor brings Jess and her girlfriend, Melanie (whom she converted!) in front of the congregation and tells them to repent for their “unnatural” passion, Melanie (Cathryn Bradshaw) bursts into tears and collapses on the floor but Jess, who is starting to preach herself, faces the pastor and quotes the Bible back to him, arguing that their love isn’t “unnatural” at all.
Her courage in standing up to the pastor would be rewarded in a lesser film (or one that was less autobiographical) but instead, as she struggles and shouts, she is tied up and gagged on the floor in a private parlor and “prayed over” for three days, without relent, until “the demon” is exorcised from her. Like most people who “confess” or “recant” during torture, Jess does so only to escape further harm. Right after she’s let go, she secretly meets up with the closeted queer member of the church-lady group, Miss Jewsbury (Celia Imrie) to give her a love letter to deliver to Melanie. Jess even continues to preach but eventually acquires another girlfriend (whom she also converts!) which permanently separates her from the church–and her home. She goes to live and work with her mother’s one acquaintance outside the church, the friendly, local undertaker, Cissy (Barbara Hicks), and at the end comes to a kind of peace with her past.
Although the film doesn’t shy away from the damage the church and her mother’s fanaticism does (at one point Jess, as a child, is kept from medical treatment because the congregation believe she is experiencing a “miracle” instead of a raging infection) the audience comes to almost the point of admiration for Jess’s mother: as much as we can muster for someone who is wrong about everything. Her determination and exuberance (Winterson’s real adoptive mother wasn’t nearly as jaunty, which Winterson documents in the nonfiction Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) is like the wind in the sails of a ship and propels the action forward. McEwan later played another religious fanatic who was cruel to young women in The Magdalene Sisters, but here she’s no cardboard villain. She’s sometimes very funny, though often unwittingly so, playing church hymns on an organ which has an added disco beat or melodramatically wondering what the neighbors will think if she’s dragged away to prison for keeping Jess out of school. Jess, who has already absorbed large chunks of The Bible, then mentions that one of the saints spent time in prison to which her mother replies, “I know that, but the neighbors don’t!”
Charlotte Coleman (a former child TV star in Britain–whom many might remember as Scarlett from Four Weddings and a Funeral–she died at age 33) is a more than worthy foil to McEwan, a persuasive and joyful preacher on and off the pulpit and also a girl giddy with love, especially when she’s with her first girlfriend, Melanie. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the two of them in a tender love scene together: their small, slender bodies signaling to us their youth and the wide eyes they make at each other showing the depth of their feelings. Without an explicit scene I don’t think we would have absorbed that Jess’s faith in love is as strong–and eventually stronger–than her faith in God. For so many of us who came out in the decades before homophobia became unfashionable, we followed love (and sexual desire) the same way the devout are supposed to follow God, without question and without fear–in spite of all the terrible things we were told about queer people and their lives. When Jess meets up with Miss Jewsbury she tells her that during the time she was prayed over she saw, or maybe hallucinated, the demon the group was trying to exorcise from her, “It was orange,” she says, the color of her hair. “It looked like me.”
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-D-CkBvSc0″]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender