This sweet, sapphic coming-of-age tale paved the way for ‘Heartstopper’ & so much more
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, with Sundance 2025 in full swing, let’s revisit the queer indie The Incredibly True Adventure Of Two Girls In Love, which premiered at the festival exactly 30 years ago.This week, the 2025 Sundance Film Festival has kicked off in the snowy mountains of Park City, Utah, where for the next two weeks, the best of American and international independent cinema will be showcased.
To celebrate the festival and its historic role in elevating queer voices, we will take a look at a groundbreaking coming-of-age film that had its premiere there exactly 30 years ago.In today’s media landscape, the queer coming-of-age story has nearly become its own small sub-genre.
Although the packaging in style and tone may vary widely, it’s become easy to identify the narrative beats, character types and thematic motifs that populate these types of stories: the sexual repression that manifests as rebellion, the friend group that the protagonist feels inevitably separated from, the furtive and passionate first love, the distant parental figures.
However, it’s also easy to forget that it wasn’t always like that.Three decades ago, LGBTQ+ film releases (those that were explicitly made by us, about us, for us) were rare, selective, and unavailable to wide sections of the mainstream audience.
