Growing up, a lesbian rom com could have changed my life. This new Australian film made me weep

Rebecca Shaw

18 February 2020 at 12:00 pm·5-min read

I was recently asked to guest on a podcast called Were You Hot in High School? The premise is fairly self-explanatory – you go on and talk about your high school experience, what dating and romance was like, and tell funny stories about it all. As I started preparing for it, I realised my answer to the podcast’s title was going to be: “I was nothing in high school.” I don’t have any funny stories.

As a kid growing up in regional Queensland in the 90s, every single minute of my life from about 11 to 20 years old was spent desperately making sure nobody ever figured out that I was queer.

I didn’t experience high school like my friends. I didn’t allow myself to have crushes, except for the fake ones I manufactured on unattainable boys to avoid suspicion. I didn’t date, I didn’t kiss anyone at a party and I went alone to the formal. I would never allow myself to feel anything for anyone, because it was too dangerous.

I shut down that part of myself completely, like some kind of teen gay robot (coming soon to Netflix).

I’ve realised that so much of what I went through happened because I didn’t know of anyone else like me. I didn’t know any out queer people, not meeting my first openly gay person until I was 18.

I never heard any positive comments about queer people, and I certainly never saw any happy queer people in real life, or on screen. Let alone other teenagers.

I was a freak, I was wrong and I was doomed. I completely believed I would never be able to be out, and I would certainly never be able to have a romantic life.

Last week, I got to attend the opening film of the Mardi Gras film festival, which for the first time in its 27-year history opened with an Australian film. It was Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt), a movie that began as a play, adapted to the screen by its writer-director, Monica Zanetti.

Wanting to move forward from the common queer story of someone struggling to accept their sexuality and the hardships of coming out, the film instead focuses on the happily gay Ellie (Sophie Hawkshaw) trying to get the courage to ask her crush, Abbie (Zoe Terakes), to the school formal. But Zanetti, in acknowledging that she couldn’t make this sort of film without everyone who trod the path before her, also intertwines a story of intergenerational queerness and loss, when Ellie is visited by the ghost of her queer activist aunt who died in the late 80s.

Full disclosure: I am friends with Zanetti, but it was destined to be the case as we are both lesbians who live in Sydney. It would be much weirder if we weren’t. And good news for everyone, especially me, avoiding an awkward conversation with her: I absolutely loved this movie. Not in an “I love all queer content and also my friend made it” way, but in the “This movie is genuinely great” way.

It is superbly written, it is beautifully acted, it is funny, it is heartfelt and it covers so many facets of queerness. It deals with everything from Sydney’s history of activism to homophobia still dealt with by teenagers today.

It touches on how queerness does make you different, but it’s to be treasured. But importantly, at its heart, it’s a cute and funny Australian teen queer romcom exploring all of the awkwardness that comes with being a teenager and having the devastatingly embarrassing thing of “liking someone” happen to you.

After the screening I got a bit emotional. I’d just been to a movie with a bunch of queer friends (and one token straight man); I’d been to a movie that was a queer romantic comedy set at high school, including some queer actors. And the person who made it all happen is my friend.

It all got me thinking again about my high school experience. I spent all of those years feeling as starkly alone as you can possibly imagine. I never felt that I could tell anyone I was queer, or that I would find anyone like me. I never dreamed that queer people could be happy and make art and tell their stories, and have those stories appear at THE MOVIES.

Fifteen-year-old me couldn’t have even imagined a night like the one I had just had in her wildest dreams.

So I shed a few sad tears for her, but overwhelmingly felt happiness that I am privileged enough to have these experiences now – and to know that in 2020 there are so many more queer kids in high schools around the country that feel safe and free to be who they are, and who will be able to awkwardly ask the person they have a crush on to see a movie like Ellie & Abbie.

Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
Ellie and Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) has an encore screening on February 23