Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain (1995) - Queer awakening and the search for a girly adventure.

If you're not a kid from the 80's and 90's than you might not even have heard of this movie. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain (1995) tells the story of two girls, Beth (Christina Ricci) and Jody (Anna Chlumsky), coming together to solve a mystery involving some gold supposedly hidden in a mountain near the town they live in. As most great coming of age stories do, the movie explores themes like trust, grief, friendship, abusive households and trauma while also delivering some pretty heartwarming and silly adventure. Also, it has some quite queer/lesbian coded character development in the mix.

I grew up in a pretty small town where there was nothing much to do, but I always dreamed of going for adventures in the forest that surrounded the city, maybe take a boat and explore the shores of the river that touched the sea in the outskirts of the town. I was also pretty afraid of both getting hurt and making my parents worry, so I never went in any of these adventures. I was a girly girl with the spirit of a tomboy — It was like this movie was made for me.

The casting brought together two of the most iconic teen actors of the time: Ricci from Casper (1995) and Anna from My Girl (1991). Ricci was Beth, a city girl forced to move to a small town in the woods, and Anna played Jody, the town's troublemaker tomboy. Coming from different social-economic realities these girls had to fight a battle to stick together, showing adults that sometimes kids just need you to trust them — even if society thinks you shouldn’t.

From their parents trying to keep them apart to how their relationship develops, much of the main character’s relationship does not feel platonic. Although I always appreciate a female character who don’t have romantic interests in movies, in this case both girls are pretty much queer coded. Jody is a tomboy you see for the first time in a fist fight with a boy, and Beth keeps choosing Jody over boys and “girly behaviours”. Maybe from today’s perspective Jody would be more aligned with a non-binary reading of the character, but in the 90’s I’m sure she would be called a lesbian by a school bully — as if that was an insult.

Back in the 80's and 90's there were not a lot of teen adventure movies where girls were more than just either the one female character in the mix, like in The Goonies (1985), or the romantic interest, as in the Back To The Future trilogy. Most coming of age movies centred around female teen characters were about falling in or out of love and the struggles it brings to growing up, including having girls being in opposite ends of a love triangle — aka, female rivalry.

Look, late in the 90’s my small town had a single out gay guy, there was no queer representation available — coming out even to myself was not even close from happening. Just seeing these two amazing girls becoming friends and their friendship staying strong through all the adversities was already good enough for me. As much as I loved romance stories, I struggled to actually want to be part of that teen reality of falling in love for the first time. I was a closeted queer girl whose friends were starting to want to spend more time talking boys than playing outside. I was having a hard time and the movie was a breath of fresh air.

One of the great things about this movie is how even the background narrative of it is about a woman defying gender expectations. The mysterious gold hidden in the Bear Mountain was supposedly left there by Molly Morgan, a female miner who apparently died in a mine collapse. It’s not a random pirate or male miner – it’s a female miner who died while living a life of adventure, and that’s what inspire this two young girls to go to an adventure. For a more in-depth analysis of the queer/lesbian themes of the film I recommend reading an article called An Obscure Lesbian Classic “Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain” — A ‘90s Movie through WLW Spectacles, by El Hersey.

Although we came a long way when it comes to female and queer representation in movies, I do believe teen girls still need more. Even when Hollywood decides to release a female-centred teen adventure movie where the main lead rescues herself, like in Netflix’s Damsel (2024), she’s a princess or a female version of a male character. I mean, it’s fair enough to play around with fairy tale tropes, but give the girls some action packed adventure that is not grounded in gender roles. Let the girls be girls and ride some boats into dangerous mountains.