Go Fish (Can I Watch, Islet, KPVI, Killer Films, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 30) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for three films in an all-night marathon of movies with more or less Queer themes, none of which I’d seen before and two of which my husband Charles had never seen either. The one Charles had seen was the first one up, Go Fish, shot on black-and-white 16 mm (at a time when it was still cheaper to make a film in black-and-white than in color; now, if anything, it’s just the reverse) in Chicago in the early 1990’s (it was released in 1994 but it had taken three years to make) by director Rose Troche and co-written by her and Guinevere Turner, who’s also in the film as one of the leads. The other lead, V. S. Brodie, is also listed as an executive producer, and typically for a film made by film students on a shoestring budget, Troche is credited not only as director and co-writer but also as editor and optical effects person. Since Go Fish Troche has directed a number of other feature films, including Bedrooms and Hallways (1998), The Safety of Objects (2001), and Chinatown Film Project (2009), but most of her work since has been for series television, including – almost inevitably – episodes of the Lesbian-themed TV series The “L”-Word. From the presentation on imdb.com and the TCM Web site I’d got the impression that Go Fish was essentially a Lesbian rom-com, but while it is that – Troche and Turner used the classic rom-com strategy of presenting two characters who we can see belong together while taking their time about making the characters realize it themselves – it’s also quite a lot more. Go Fish was considered part of the so-called “New Queer Cinema” of the 1990’s, films made by openly Queer filmmakers determined to avoid the wages-of-sin miseries previous movie people had inflicted on their Lesbian or Gay characters.

It’s also a film very much ahead of its time in acknowledging that not all Queer people are white: one of the romantic leads, whose birth name is Camille but goes by “Max West,” is a Latina who’s thrown out of her family’s home when her mom discovers she’s Lesbian. And the woman she seeks solace with when that happens and ultimately moves in with as a platonic roommate is an African-American Lesbian film professor named Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), who has her own rambunctious sex life but also serves as the voice of reason. Max spots a woman named Ely (V. S. Brodie) at a table in a part-diner, part-bar with a largely Lesbian clientele, and because she’s tall, skinny and has long, stringy, hippie-ish hair Max is initially turned off by her. But Kia has become determined to get Max and Ely together even though Ely has a long-distance relationship going with a woman named Kate (whom we never see), who lives in Seattle. The two haven’t seen each other in nearly two years, but Ely is either clinging to the hope that she and Kate can become a real couple again or using Kate as an excuse to avoid any romantic, emotional, or sexual attachments with women in Chicago. One of the things I liked about Go Fish (the title comes from the children’s card game but it also might be an oblique reference to the slang term “fish,” used by woman-hating Gay men to describe either women generally or the alleged smell of their sex organs in particular) is it plays against the stereotype that Lesbians don’t get down ‘n’ dirty about sex. Not only are the characters shown in at least the beginnings of sexual excitement over each other, there’s one remarkable scene in which four of the characters, lying crossways from each other, their heads linked together, in a conversational pose that recurs throughout the movie, discuss the sexiest way to refer to a woman’s main sex organ.

Ironically, the hottest and most explicit sex scene in Go Fish involves one of the women having sex with a man – and it’s a shock when we realize that her sex partner is male. This triggers a fascinating debate that’s at least 20 years ahead of its time as to whether a woman who has sex with men as well as with women can still call herself a “Lesbian” and whether her dalliance with a man threatens her Lesbian identity. The woman in question anticipates the modern-day “Queer theory,” with its rejection of the whole idea that sexual attachments towards one gender or the other define your identity and belief that you should be able to have sex with any willing partner of whichever gender without feeling that characterizes you as “Lesbian,” “Gay,” or even “Bisexual.” There’s also a plot gimmick in that Max’s and Ely’s first date was to a screening of a new film by a Gay male director, which puts them off because even though the director is Gay he’s still stuck in the old-fashioned negative stereotypes of how to depict Queer people on screen. (Remember that this is a movie both made by and about film students.) Later Ely, who in the meantime has had all that long, stringy, hippie-ish hair cut off and ended up looking quite boyish (enough so that once she and Max get together at last, I could readily imagine people seeing them on the street assuming they’re a straight couple, just as I appreciate Rose Troche’s irony in giving both her Lesbian protagonists and a good friend of their, Mel [Brooke Webster], male names), and Max make plans for another date, though in the end they just stay in and there’s a weird scene in which Max notes that Ely’s fingernails are split, she tries to cut them with Max’s toenail clippers, Max takes over and the two ultimately end up in bed together. (One of the other characters even jokes about nail-cutting as foreplay.) Go Fish is a quite charming movie that holds up surprisingly well, and in 1994 it got major distribution (from the Samuel Goldwyn Company), got excellent reviews and did well (at least by independent-cinema standards) at the box office.