Megan is an all-American girl. A cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. But Megan doesn’t like kissing her boyfriend very much. And she’s pretty touchy with her cheerleader friends. Her conservative parents worry that she must be a lesbian and send her off to “sexual redirection” school, where she must, with other lesbians and gays learn how to be straight.

…But I Was a Girl: The Story of Frieda Belinfante tells the story of Frieda Belinfante (1905–1995), a remarkable woman who was the first female conductor to have her own symphony orchestra, first in Holland and later in OrangeCounty, California. Controversial, because of her sexuality, she showed a remarkably strong and positive will in everything she did. Born in a family of musicians in Amsterdam, she joined the resistance during World War II, then later fled to Switzerland. After the war she moved to the US where she resumed her musical career in the Hollywood studios, and formed her own symphony orchestra with Hollywood musicians. The story of Frieda’s lifeis told by herself, her older sister Renee, old students and friends, and illustrated by the places she lived, archive materials of her orchestras and some of her music.

The oldest known “out” African-American lesbian remembers ten colorful decades in this hour-long documentary, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1999. Born July 23, 1899, in Springfield, IL, Ruth Ellis spent most of her life in Detroit. A pioneering independent black businesswoman, she operated her own print shop until the age of 65. In the home she shared with Cecilene “Babe” Franklin, her partner of more than 30 years, she played host to innumerable gatherings of the city’s African-American gays and lesbians in an age when segregation excluded them from white homosexual society. A participant in the civil rights movement and a witness of the riots that tore Detroit apart in the 1960s, Ellis later became an icon for, and active participant in, the city’s multicultural lesbian and feminist community.