For anyone who’s frantically googled “How do I know if I’m a girl who likes girls???” within the past 10 years, the Gay & Lesbian section of Netflix is an all-too-familiar place. A sizable percentage of those searchers likely found the affirmation they were looking for after streaming Donna Deitch’s 1985 lesbian romance Desert Hearts.



Three decades after it was made, this particular lesbian romance — about Vivian, a 35-year-old English professor from New York who, in 1959, temporarily relocates to a ranch in Reno for a quickie divorce, then meets a wild-hearted younger woman named Cay — still resonates, particularly with a new generation of viewers. The film, which is based on the novel Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, has experienced a spirited second life, spurred by streaming options like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Young women make fan cuts on YouTube, reblog GIF sets on Tumblr, and reach out to the director, Deitch, with their stories.

This week, Desert Hearts returned for a special screening in 35 mm at BFI Flare: London’s LGBT Film Festival. When Flare (formerly known as the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) launched in 1986, Desert Hearts was on its starting slate, at a time when lesbian stories were barely getting made, let alone being seen by mainstream audiences.

“People will come up to me after screenings at festivals,” Deitch told BuzzFeed News over coffee at the BFI Southbank theater. “They say, ‘Can I just tell you what happened to me after I saw Desert Hearts? I came out after that.’” At this week’s screening, she announced that she’s going to start asking people to record their revelations. “So many people have been telling me these stories over the years — I decided it was time I start collecting them.”

These days, coming out epiphanies can likely be attributed to a wide variety of pieces of pop culture. In the post-Ellen era, there’s no longer a dearth of lesbian storytelling in film and television — see: The L Word, Orange Is the New Black, et al. Queer people don’t need to look quite as long and hard anymore to see a version of themselves reflected onscreen (though LGBT representation still skews white, cis, monosexual, and male). Even as queer characters become more commonplace in media, however, a certain queer storyline remains, frustratingly, rather rare: happy endings.