STOLEN MOMENTS

Current mainstream media coverage of lesbian issues, at least in the USA, seems focused myopically on the entertainment world's Gang of Four – Ellen, Anne, Melissa and k.d. – none of whom need to be mentioned in Margaret Westcott's sweeping chronicle of “the silent sin” in the western world, from Sapphic poetry in ancient Greece to an all-dyke biker gang today. “We are a story that hasn't been told,” says one of the interviewees, and she's sadly correct. Much of the history of homosexuality, especially relations between women, had been systematically destroyed, by thte Church in the Dark Ages, and by the Nazis in the not-too-distant past. Westcott rediscovers Netherlander (a rather appropriate designation) Maria Van Antwerpen, soldier, tailor and physician, who was married for three years before the bride discovered Maria wasn't male; Natalie Barney, alias “the wilde girl from Cincinnati,” whose gender-bending literary salon thrived in Paris for six decades; America in the 1950s, where police harassment and moral condemnation (from the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, of all people) set the stage for Stonewall. Eye-opening for viewers of any persuasion, STOLEN MOMENTS may well be the definitive documentary on the long-closeted subject.