TELEVISION / Beneath the maple leaf: Tom Sutcliffe on a film about lesbians

'VICTORIA BC' read the caption for one of the scenes in Forbidden Love (C4), and you could have been forgiven for thinking that this was a temporal rather than a geographical reference. Part of Channel Four's season of gay programming (Summer's Out), the film talked to Canadian lesbians about their experiences in the Fifties and Sixties and uncovered social attitudes that were positively antediluvian.

If you were looking for a definition of minority programming you couldn't do much better than a feature-length documentary about Canadian lesbians, with a fair proportion of Canadians presumably drawing the line at 100 minutes of lesbianism and an equal number of lesbians probably having strong views about the propriety of parading Canada all over our screens.

In fact, in common with other programmes in the series (last Thursday's Storm in a Teacup in particular), this was a real treat; an intriguing slice of social history which constantly disrupted any simple view of the past as a time when a dyke was something that held back seawater. The film was rather brilliantly illustrated with the pulp paperbacks from the Sixties, masterworks like Women's Barracks, The Constant Urge, Warped Desires and Satan's Daughter. Beneath lurid copylines ('Told with unblushing honesty, here is a penetrating study of society's greatest curse: homosexuality'), sultry vamps tested the breaking strain of their cotton blouses while smouldering at the girl at the next table.

The books provided a rather charming confirmation of the corrupting power of literature (if it can't do that, what can it do?). Sold in drug-stores across Canada they alerted farm-girls in Alberta and schoolteachers in Ontario that there might be more to life than marriage and children. They also testified to the strange paradoxes of gay life before the achievements of gay liberation - an odd condition of both being highly visible and undetectable. Lesbians weren't really meant to exist in public at all but they all knew which area of the beach to head for or which downtown bar would prove congenial.

All the same, these were innocent times. 'Are sexual perverts . . . drifting into Manitoba?' read the headline on one contemporary newspaper report, suggesting a peculiarly effete form of attack, with large forces of perverts flouncing about aimlessly on the state border. Even the lesbians were innocent - one sweetly recalled that she had set out with her friend for Greenwich Village, asking the taxi-drivers where they could find the lesbians, while another confessed that she and her first lover had simply not known what to do (in a physical sense) when they first met - they literally had to feel their way.

Without underplaying the pain caused by prejudice, the film was finally rather uplifting, containing, as it did, narratives of love against the odds, moral courage and tolerance learned the hard way. You could even detect, here and there, a faint nostalgia for the bad old days, when your secret life could provide an escape from your public one - that heady, dangerous thrill of life lived in wartime.