Being a Lesbian isn’t a choice, but at TIFF you can try it on for 40 minutes

An immersive experience coming to TIFF aims to combat stigma and discrimination by putting users in the shoes of a…. Lesbian?

TIFF is just around the corner, and with it, a new experience for film lovers to enjoy. The inaugural Innovation Hub is an exhibition of award-winning and audience favourite projects featuring immersive storytelling utilizing interactive virtual reality experiences, mixed reality installations and AI glasses.

Part of the new experience is Dutch artist  Iris van der Meule’s Lesbian Simulator, which is making its Canadian premiere at TIFF. The program allows players to step into the shoes of a Lesbian, creating an avatar that allows them to navigate the complexities of friendship, dating, celebrating Pride and other everyday realities of moving through the world as a Queer woman.

Colourful, playful and deliberately game-like, the virtual reality experience transforms Queer life into something people from outside of the community can actively experience. But beneath the bright visuals and side quests is a complicated question: What does it mean to simulate a life that, for many Queer people, has never felt entirely safe to live openly?

In an interview, the creator explained that the approximately 40-minute interactive virtual reality experience is based on her own life. She says Lesbian Simulator celebrates 2SLGBTQIA+ community, love and Pride while also confronting discrimination, homophobia and the prejudices that continue to shape everyday life for Queer and Trans people. 

“I always say it’s an experience slash a game,” van der Meule told Queer & Now. “You learn through being interactive and doing small mini games that motivate you to experience certain things that some [heterosexual] people might not come across in their own life.”

The inspiration for Lesbian Simulator

So how does one find the inspiration to develop a Lesbian simulator? The game developer explained that the project began with a realization that will sound painfully familiar to many Queer people: Discrimination that becomes so routine you stop recognizing how unacceptable it is.

Growing up in a rural part of the Netherlands, she says being openly Queer was not widely accepted. As a young adult attending art school and beginning a relationship, she found herself experiencing verbal aggression and discrimination in public simply for holding her girlfriend’s hand.

This kind of homophobia happened often enough that it began to feel like part of van der Meule’s daily life.

“It almost felt like a daily routine,” she says. “And when I realized that, I was like, ‘That’s really f*****d up, actually, because why am I accepting this as something that is happening in my life?’”

Read More

• ‘Dyke is a political identity,’ Organizers and attendees on what Ottawa’s Dyke March is really about
• ‘Lesbian Jesus’ Hayley Kiyoko is back with a new project: ‘Girls Like Girls’ the movie

The experience became even more revealing when she spoke to her parents, who were surprised that homophobia and harassment remained an issue. van der Meule says her mother and father had assumed the Netherlands was safe for 2SLGBTQIA+ people. After all, it was the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.

But legal recognition and lived acceptance have never been quite the same thing, and for van der Meule, that disconnect became the foundation for Lesbian Simulator. She explains that she wanted to create something that could make the experiences often hidden from non-Queer people visible, while encouraging audiences to recognize the blind spots in the societies they consider accepting.

“I want to make an art piece that can teach the people around me,” she says. “I can teach them about the things we experience, and hopefully put that mirror to our society and show the blind spots and motivate people to be a bit more active when it comes to fighting for Queer rights.”

That is where the simulator becomes particularly interesting. The process of increasing Queer representation in media has traditionally asked audiences to watch: the coming-out story, the first kiss, the tragedy, and the struggle.

Virtual reality offers something different by welcoming viewers’ participation. In Lesbian Simulator, the audience isn’t simply observing a Lesbian’s life from the safety of a theatre seat, but they instead are being asked to create a life and move through a world shaped by the possibilities and limitations presented to Queer people.

Of course, no 40-minute virtual reality experience can fully reproduce what it means to be Lesbian. Identity is not a game mechanic, and oppression is not something a heterosexual player can truly understand simply by putting on a headset. But that may not be the point.

Read More

• REVIEW: Hayley Kiyoko’s ‘Girls Like Girls’ movie turns a beloved Queer anthem into a heartfelt coming-of-age story
• Where do the lesbians go? Diving into the lack of spaces for queer women & why they’re essential

For van der Meule, the work is about creating opportunities for people who may never encounter these experiences themselves to engage with them differently and hopefully emerge with a greater understanding of the people around them.

She hopes heterosexual audiences leave with a stronger sense of responsibility, particularly when they witness discrimination against queer people.

“I hope it motivates them that if they ever see someone getting discriminated [against], for example, that they would step in and help the queer person involved,” she says.

But Lesbian Simulator isn’t solely designed as an educational tool for straight people. The virtual reality program also offers something Queer audiences have spent decades demanding from film, television and other cultural spaces: the opportunity to see themselves and to have fun.

Van der Meule says she hopes Lesbians and other Queer people recognize themselves in the experience and encounter a representation that includes joy, celebration and play.

Lesbian Simulator: More than an educational tool

Queer communities are used to having our stories framed as political statements, often not because of anything inherently political, but rather simply because 2SLGBTQIA+ people exist within the narratives of these stories. Lesbian stories, in particular, have often been shaped by scarcity, which includes little representation, underdeveloped or “throwaway” characters and an exhausting tendency to frame our lives in one of two ways: sex or suffering.

Van der Meule remembers that scarcity herself. Growing up, she began searching for people like her in media after realizing she was different from her peers and not interested in boys. But finding queer representation was not always easy.

“I had to dig deep in the internet to find The L Word, for example,” she says.

She says that greater representation can help Queer people explore their identities, understand themselves, and feel safer while also helping non-Queer audiences recognize 2SLGBTQIA+ identity as an ordinary part of human life.

That is ultimately what makes Lesbian Simulator feel like an especially fitting addition to TIFF’s Innovation Hub. The future of storytelling is often discussed in terms of technological possibility: artificial intelligence, mixed reality, virtual reality, interactivity. The conversation tends to focus on what the technology can do, but Lesbian Simulator asks a more interesting question: What can technology make us feel?

For 2SLGBTQIA+ people, the answer may be recognition. A chance to see our lives represented not as an abstract political debate, a tragedy waiting to happen, or softcore pornography, but as something messy, joyful, funny and worth celebrating. For everyone else, it may be something closer to empathy.

Lesbian Simulator makes its Canadian premiere at TIFF’s Innovation Hub, running Sept. 10 to 16.