Invisible (2021) User Reviews

An important movie was in there somewhere

[Red-125 · 7/10 · 12 October 2021]

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.

Fantastic Film

[dgoldes · 10/10 · 27 June 2021]

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.

So Much Talent Revealed in This Moving Doc!

[drbon · 10/10 · 30 October 2021]

TJ Parsell's new film Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music is deserving of every award (11 and counting!) it's now winning at film festivals nationwide. Invisible's fresh look at lesbian artists in the music industry is an important addition to what we know about homophobia and sexism in good-old-boy American culture. The documentary reveals the faces and struggles of both known and unfamiliar women who, we learn, are the real singer-songwriters behind mainstream country music hits. From Jess Leary and Tye Fleming to Pamela Rose, Maryann Kennedy and Bonnie Baker, these are the women who kept their lesbian identities and relationships a secret until now--in order to gain steady work in red-state Nashville.

Even in 2020, audiences are startled to learn that behind the success of a man like Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, or Willie Nelson, there's a gifted lesbian songwriter, someone who paid a steep price of silence and invisibility to avoid expulsion from the conservative country music scene. Those few who did make their true selves known early in their careers, such as a young and gifted Dianne Davidson coming out in the middle of world touring during the country-rock 1970s, were unceremoniously drummed out of country music. It didn't go better for top-charting Chely Wright, who came out publicly to her fans almost thirty years later; Wright endured a wave of public shaming and rejection which led to her near-suicide attempt. Invisible also presents butch and nonbinary artists candidly acknowledging that their gender-bending presentation made it impossible to hide their "difference," forcing the choice of behind-the-scenes work, earning a living out of sight of the critical media.

The artists whose stories are told in the film are now finding support and sympathy from lesbian audiences as they tour independently or as a group, playing the hits they wrote for mainstream radio.

Invisible's point is that coming out in Nashville has a dollar cost. It's a familiar tale in a homophobic society: the choice between making a living and living authentically. If we understand that lesbians are everywhere, shaping even the most traditional soundtracks of Americana, all the way back to Katherine Lee Bates, who wrote "America the Beautiful," Invisible reminds us that bias against lesbians is far from gone, and thus many of our best national artists remain unknown and unseen.

Invisible also shows us the powerful role male allies can play in facilitating better public awareness of lesbian musicians. TJ Parsell joins a welcome list of men who are actively archiving and celebrating lesbian artists: fair turnaround, as he has said himself. "For men of my age who came of age in the 1980s and lost many gay men friends, it was the women who stepped up for us, in such a huge way."

See this film and support it! I'll be using it in the college classroom as an incredible tool of transformation. We need many more allies to bring "invisible" artists to better national attention. Filmmaker TJ Parsell offers a beautiful, hard-hitting look at the once-closeted women whose country tunes have been cued up on our playlists all these years.

A Great Documentary

[DavoZed · 10/10 · 7 June 2022]

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.