In a time when conservative right-wing politics are seeking to control queerness and limit queer visibility, all while AI is stealing from queer visual culture and appropriating the content without inhabiting its politics, it’s important to spotlight queer art and keep the conversations going. Which is why I would like to reminisce about one of this summer’s highlights - Film Club’s open air screening of Lesbian Space Princess - a laugh-out-loud animated feature film from Australia. 

It follows Saira; she's a lesbian, she's in space, and she's a princess. While the film starts on a familiar romantic hero trajectory, it ultimately becomes a coming-of-age story that pokes fun at heteronormativity without rehashing the tired stories of oppression and marginalisation. It's a celebration of queerness that focuses less on romantic love but rather on self-love; the most important kind of all.

As the title tells you, the tongue is firmly in cheek and that is exactly the point: there is wordplay, double entendres, musical theatre, visual jokes, and tons of satire. It's brimming with detail, charm, and pure undiluted love for the queer community. Lesbian Space Princess viscerally feels like it was made by and for queer people. It imagines a future where spaceships don't fly in straight lines, and where nobody even remembers the Straight White Maliens who used to rule the gay-laxy. 

Unsurprisingly, the discourse about Lesbian Space Princess online is more fraught. All happy comments are alike; each unhappy comment is unhappy in its own way. There are film bros pointing out "pacing issues", straight white dudes decrying identity politics, 14-year-old boys with Rick and Morty posters in their rooms gatekeeping sci-fi; it’s an acapella of a million fragile male egos cracking. To which I can only respond in this demographic’s own rhetoric language: “Don’t be so sensitive, can’t you take a joke?”

Another counterpoint is whether the film is ostensibly trans-exclusionary because of its flat genital politics and its use of the labrys - a traditionally lesbian symbol that was also co-opted by the TERFs. These critiques, however, are not a justified condemnation of transmisogyny, as they don’t hold up to scrutiny. While a trans person’s response to the penis being portrayed as a malicious force is valid and understandable, the film only does so in the context of Straight White Maliens and the violence of heteropatriarchy. Moreover, one of Saira’s moms is a trans woman who can summon her own labrys, which serves a positive representation of inclusion. “…[The labrys] should belong to all lesbians, including trans lesbians” says co-creator Emma Hough Hobbs.

All of this is to say there are endless reasons to (re)watch Lesbian Space Princess, whether you’re queer to not. It’s a fantastical adventure towards finding community and loving yourself. It's cute, camp, unapologetic, and punk, just like queerness.