Cheryl Dunye | Vanilla Sex / 1992

being called “other” by “others” is pretty strange

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (director) Vanilla Sex / 1992

 

This 3-minute short is a very minor work by the major lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. In Vanilla Sex, Dunye speaks about having attended a conference with mostly white lesbians in Los Angeles, primarily speaking about S&M.

    Through their discussions she discovered that “vanilla sex” in SM parlance meant sex without toys. And she was a bit startled for them to use that phrase in that respect, because, she suddenly remembers that at one point a fellow black woman was applying the same term to her, describing her as having “vanilla sex” because she was then dating a lot of white women.

    She remembers feeling offended on a personal level, feeling hurt that someone would apply such a term to her entirely negative. She finds it interesting, accordingly, that in the same community, the lesbian community, that such a term means two such radically different things. “It meant one thing to black women, and something totally different to this group of white women.”

    What Dunye is hinting at, in her rather casual discussion of a simple two-word phrase is that even with the female gay community there are racial distinctions in language wherein the same pair of words can be addressed as a taunt or attack for going outside of racial boundaries or suggest simply an absence of something that gives pleasure, a shift from “who you do to what you do.”

     The irony here is what characterizes so much of Dunye’s filmmaking. As she puts it, “being called ‘other’ by ‘others’ is pretty strange.”

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).