Sarah left their home that night and sat crying in her car. As a child, she had been repeatedly sexually abused by an uncle —this assault felt just as violating. But she still wasn't sure if she would call it rape. "Because we were together, I thought that she had the right to have sex with me the way she wanted," Sarah explains. After falling hard for the gathering’s vibe, Weinraub wrangled a gig as the club’s visual chronicler, initially taking stills, then switching to video. Her access gave the director the best kind of participant-observer vantage,one that delivers vérité rawness accompanied by a savvy, tender affection for Shakedown’s denizens: its dancers, its studs, its patrons. A raunchy striptease video made by two women purporting to be British Airways stewardesses has become an internet sensation. For young lads, the risk comes from prostitutes who lure them onto the beach at night and steal wallets and mobiles. Most worrying is the culture among some holiday reps of preying on young girls. Many are in contests to bed the most.”

Holiday reps are supposed to chaperone kids on organised bar crawls, but when their shift ends at 2am they often abandon them. I’ve seen reps leave drunk kids in the gutter. Performance is at the heart of “Shakedown,” one of the reasons it’s rich fodder for brainy considerations of LGBTQ identity and gender. Miss Mahogany talks about the importance of establishing a fantasy from the jump, from before the clothes come off. A later interview finds dancer Egypt and her girlfriend at home. “Egypt is a fantasy,” says the Shakedown star of her hardcore-dance, feminine persona, repeating the line for effect. Lounging next to her on the couch, her girlfriend talks about going from “psycho fan” to romantic partner. What she once craved, well, she tells the director, “I can’t wait till she get home, take the makeup off, put on regular clothes. She Aisha again.”

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Weeks passed before Ella, 25, began to confide in her friends that she had been raped. While she didn't find them to be exactly unsupportive, there was still a consistent and major hurdle: "They are oftentimes surprised when they realize it was a woman who assaulted me." Perhaps aware their antics are pushing the boundaries, the pair return to the more mundane activity of washing hair until the cameraman (or woman) decides to call it a day. The eight-minute video, entitled Sexy Two Air Hostesses in Uniform has no words just music, but has been viewed more than 115,000 times on YouTube.

Shakedown pulled up stakes in July 2004. The club where it was housed at the time just wasn’t working out any longer. It bounced around some, but hopes of a space to call its own never materialized. There’s little wonder then that the doc ends with a mix of the melancholy and the triumphal, the mournful and the boastful. When female victims of female assaults do pursue legal action, gender bias can severely hinder their ability to accurately report sexual violence. "Oftentimes, women in abusive same-sex relationships tell us that even when they do call the police, they are treated dismissively," recounts Kauffman. "'Women aren't violent.' 'This is just a girl fight, this is a waste of our time,' is a common attitude." According to the 2015 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, of LGBTQ individuals in Ohio who did report intimate partner violence, 21 percent experienced "indifferent" reactions from police. Another 28 percent experienced hostility.

The woman, who appeared drunk and embarrassed, covered her breasts as the reveller began simulating sex acts while leering at the crowd for approval. A British Airways spokesman said: “We’re aware of the video. Investigations continue to establish their identity.” Most Read

This seems like it shouldn't be a victory. And yet, the list of movies who've accomplished the same feat is painfully abbreviated. Don't talk to me about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie made famous for its extended, impractical sex scenes and allegations of harassment by its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche reportedly bullied the two female protagonists as well as his staff, forcing them to work 16-hour workdays under extreme pressure. Critics further accused the director of creating "voyeuristic" sex scenes intended to solicit the male gaze. And then, for women who might not be "out," shame about their sexual orientation or a fear of being outted significantly hinders their ability to report. If you're closeted—or even semi-closeted—formally coming forward with sexual assault allegations could mean compromising your professional or familial relationships by revealing your orientation. (The guarantee of keeping your job as an LGBTQ American currently varies per state.) The downward economic spiral of losing one's job to report a same-sex rape that won't even be deemed legitimate is simply not worth it—literally. Friend groups can become divided and the survivor may fear losing her only LGBTQ support network," Kauffman says. "This can be especially challenging for survivors who live in areas where the community is small or there is a more hostile climate towards LGBTQ people." Okay, maybe a spit-take feels warranted: an adult entertainment online depot and a cinephile hub, really!? The overlap likely says something worth teasing out about the Venn diagram meeting of the two, but it doesn’t take long into the movie to see how “Shakedown” can comfortably occupy either space. Here the “hood” is celebrated. Which doesn’t mean its patrons aren’t taken to task occasionally. In one scene, all swagger and sweetness, Ronnie-Ron lectures a panhandler on managing his finances. In another, she chastises her patrons: “The one thing you can say about Hispanics … they all get along.” Whether that’s unequivocally true is another matter. Her point: Act right, you all. During a set, Egypt schools the room about Shakedown etiquette, “If you straight, you don’t need to be in the front.”At first, the sex was good," says Sarah. "But she always wanted more than what I could give. One day she came home with a strap-on; if I loved her, she said, I would allow her to use it." Sarah wasn't interested. "It was just something that I didn't like and didn't want," she says. She declined for months, her partner repeatedly pressuring her, until one night, Sarah's partner assaulted her with the strap-on. "Even though I was crying the whole time, she never stopped," Sarah recalls. But it might be time for the protagonists to hit the runway, as their employees have failed to see the funny side. In the meantime, Langenderfer-Magruder asserts that language can be a powerful place to start correcting this oversight. Omitting the standard "he" as perpetrator and "she" for victim in laws, educational materials, and even just general discussion encourages awareness. "Research has clearly demonstrated that intimate partner violence does not happen in a solely heterosexual context—and the way we discuss it should reflect that," she says.

Stephanie Trilling, manager of community awareness and prevention services at the Boston Area Rape Crisis (BARCC), observes that for her queer female clients who have been assaulted by women, the first hurdle is simply understanding the assault as rape. Since this scenario is rarely portrayed in the media or in educational programming, "it can be especially challenging to identify their experience as violence," she says. "Many people have a difficult time believing that a woman could be capable of inflicting violence on another person." Ever since Director Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience premiered at TIFF in 2017, it's been the talk of the town among the five queer women who care about this kind of stuff. The film tells story of Orthodox Jewish lesbians in London: Esti (Rachel McAdams) caught in a loveless relationship with a Rabbi, and Ronit (Rachel Weisz) trapped in a series of meaningless heterosexual hookups.A British bouncer who has worked Magaluf’s bars and clubs for three years tonight told us: “I will not allow my own two daughters ever to go there.” These gender norms can directly contribute to distrust of a victim's claims, says Lisa Langenderfer-Magruder, co-author of a recent study of LGBTQ intimate partner violencein Colorado. "When someone is confronted with a situation that doesn't quite fit that major narrative, they may question its validity," she says. All of this amounts to a culture in which most research on partner violence focuses on heterosexual relationships. "So, in some ways, we're playing catch up." It's been four years since Alaina was raped and she still has no plans to pursue formal charges against her rapist. She says, unflinchingly, that she has moved on in other ways: She's chosen to change her name, and has moved to a new city where she has pursued a successful freelance writing career, often writing about sexual assault within the LGBTQ community. Dyer says even the victim is offering little help right now. "When people go through that kind of situation, they're not as likely to provide as much information as we'd like," he said. "But that's normal somebody that's been victimized to that degree. So we're continuing to work with her."