“When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” Lesbian Lines opens with this quote from American writer Barbara Ueland.
The title refers to an underground helpline-cum-queer directory available in all major Irish cities, during a period in queer history which is a poorly documented but vital piece of Irish history. Ireland, as an “island of secrets”, a place of religion-infused institutional misogyny and homophobia, is vividly painted through this combination of docufiction, archive footage and interviews.
Holmes brings a group of original Lesbian Line volunteers together for a series of interviews, with most women speaking onscreen via a few hotline-style, audio-only conversations. The focus is on collectivism, and little time is spent on any one individual woman, with the exception of Joni Crone. Joni was interviewed on The Late Late Show in 1980, where she was the first woman to come out as gay on Irish television. This is presented as not just a pivotal moment for queer public visibility, but also a moment of self-actualisation for many of the Lesbian Line volunteers.
Coming out as a lesbian in 1980s Ireland could mean losing custody of your children, suffering domestic violence and the threat of hellfire. Even within feminist movements at the time, lesbians were often seen as nuisances, an embarrassing distraction to the righteous cause of “normal” heterosexual women. As such, the Lesbian Lines were an invaluable site of empathy and comfort in a hostile society, as well as a means of community organising.
Rather than seeing their gayness as a personal failure, this documentary opens up a whole new possibility of seeking out a lesbian community, a “gay holy communion”, as one woman recounts. Many of the initial callers of the first Lesbian Line, based in Dublin, went on to become volunteers themselves. The lines expanded to Cork, Galway and Belfast, with calls coming from all over the island.
The function was twofold: initially, to act as a signpost and introduction to the local lesbian social scene. However, a more profound form of support was another type of service. Many of the calls were from older women in desperate situations or were just completely silent. Several former volunteers speak movingly of callers driven to suicide, of women who had been in the closet for 60 or 70 years, and women trapped in abusive marriages. While Lesbian Lines is often celebratory in tone, the suffering of many of its callers haunts the narrative, along with an awareness that there are generations of queer women's history that are simply lost to us.
The onscreen interviewees are captivating at their most casual: tales of drunken nights out, romances, flirtations and friendships. The intention of the Lesbian Lines is that most callers would then meet the local lesbian scene face to face, an interesting contrast to the entirely digital communities many queer people encounter today.
One particularly striking sequence in the film is a mapping of Belfast's lesbian scene during the height of the Troubles. After passing through iron gates and a quick full-body search, the lesbian community met in long-closed, gay-owned nightclubs, pubs that are still around today, and on 5 am walks in the Botanic Gardens. The intimacy of the portrait of gay life in this period is particularly moving.
While Holmes skilfully edits together a variety of material, there is an onscreen acknowledgement of the lack of materials remaining from the Lesbian Lines themselves. Perhaps to bridge this gap, there are several docufiction scenes dramatising the experience of both callers and answerers. These sequences are stylistically beautiful, but they jar with what is resonant about the rest of the film. They are hyper-stylised, with liberal use of a fog machine and women screaming underwater.
We may feel light years away from the 1980s in terms of attitudes to gay people and queer media representations, but Lesbian Lines is a vital recording of queer testimony and history. History is needed, as one volunteer eloquently puts it, “to be our full selves”, a sentiment extended to queer people in Ireland today.
Much can be extrapolated from Lesbian Lines, such as the need for third spaces and community-led support services for LGBTQ youth, and how the ones that exist now are rapidly disappearing. But at its heart, it is a patchwork of intimate and personal stories, all of which we are the better for knowing.
Lesbian Lines screened at Docs Ireland on 19th June 2026.
