Desert Hearts is a gay love story in which no one's lives are threatened and there's a happily ever after.

Here's the twist. It was made in 1985.

We've talked about a lot of landmark queer movies on this show.

Desert Hearts was released 33 years before Love Simon.

The difference between 1985 and 2018 isn't that there are queer love stories being told on film.

It's that studios believed that these movies could be profitable.

The budget for Desert Arts was $1.5 million, and it was scraped together by the director Donna Deach.

Famously, she sold her house in order to make the movie.

It was funded by individuals, mostly rich lesbians.

A room with the view, a tiny, independent but straight romance from the same year,

had a budget of $3 million, twice the size.

And as far as we know, no one had to sell their house to make it.

Forget that Back to the Future, again in 1985, had a $19 million studio-backed budget.

Desert Hearts is an adaptation of a 1964 novel of the same name by Jane Rule.

It follows Vivian, an uptight professor from Columbia University,

arriving in Reno, Nevada, on the train in her chignon and heels,

in order to get a quickie divorce. It takes place in 1959,

and Vivian has to stay in town for six weeks for the divorce to be executed, so she bunks up

at a ranch built for women who are also going through the same process, hosted by Francis.

Frances is older, she's down to earth and welcoming towards Vivian.

I've always lived in the city.

I don't know what to do with all this space.

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