Reinventing Lesbian Youth in Su Friedrich’s Cinematic Autoqueerography Hide and Seek

“My name is not Lucille! It’s Lu!” cries a 12-year-old small-town 1960s girl in Su Friedrich’s black-and-white film Hide and Seek. Lu’s struggle for self-definition, out of her straight and narrow classmate’s heteronorma-tivity, is a quest for reevaluation of lesbian adolescence and their influence on adult women’s life. This film’s critical cinematic investigation of queer girlhood; same-sex friendship and bonding between straight girls, ‘baby-dykes,’ and tomboys; heterocentric popular media; and implicit and explicit homophobia is a mosaic or assemblage of interviews with adult lesbians who recount their adolescent same-sex attractions, fictional youth queer melodrama, and diverse excerpts from sex educational films of the 1960s, nature films, and Brian Desmond Hurst’s adventure film Simba about rebellious Africans in Kenya. The personal stories and the fictional narrative are interwoven in Hide and Seek into a bittersweet reconsideration of nostalgic lesbian stories and microhisto-ries as a source of evolvement and empowerment.