Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music

As a DJ at San Francisco's same-sex country western dance club, I was thrilled to see this film at the Frameline film festival. Learning about the gay women who have created the country sound we love was a revelation. I highly recommend this film.

A great behind the scenes look at country music and specifically the Nashville scene. The success of many male and female country music stars was heavily dependent on the songwriting talents of non-binary women.

The country music industry is one of the strongest, most toxic patriarchal structures in the US. The stars had enormous success while the women writing their songs paid a terrible price.

Another review here compares this movie to Shawshank Redemption and Schindler's List. Those are fictionalized, sanitized movies about events.

This is a film about actual events and naturally, it is much better and truer than the Wonder Bread that someone like Spielberg puts out.

Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music (2021) was written and directed by T. J. Parsell.

This movie is about an important topic--the serious discrimination faced by lesbian women in country & western music. In fact, even in 2021, country & western radio stations won't play music sung by lesbians who have identified themselves as gay.

Talented lesbian women either have to hide their sexual orientation or stick to songwriting. Lesbians writing great songs can get their songs sung by famous artists, but they can't sing the songs themselves.

This is a topic that needed to be addressed, and I'm glad that Invisible was made. However, I don't think this movie does justice to the topic.

The film is disjointed and poorly edited. One of the lesbian women wrote a song that was sung by Linda Ronstadt. However, do we really need so many screen minutes devoted to her meeting Ronstadt? Ronstadt isn't a lesbian, and she didn't face that prejudice.

One of the lesbian songwriters adopted a son, who is now an adolescent football player. Do we really need to follow him to his football game?

My sense is that director Parsell shot enormous amounts of footage, and then couldn't bear to part with enough of it. So what should have been a great movie about an important topic was an OK movie about an important topic.

We saw this movie virtually as part of Rochester's outstanding ImageOut LGBT Film Festival. The film has an IMDb rating of 9.3. (Better than The Shawshank Redemption, Schindler's list, etc.) My rating of 7 means that I'm swimming against the tide. My guess is that people were so happy that the movie was made that they didn't really care about how well it was crafted. Maybe they're right.