A feature film that documents the history and impact of lesbian fiction from the 1920s through the 1990s. Narrator Lillian Faderman recounts the impact key world events had on LGBTQ history throughout the decades. With interviews from numerous trailblazing lesbian authors, including Ann Bannon, Rita Mae Brown, Jewel Gomez and Sarah Waters, we learn how these world events helped shape their stories and to what extent the stories were reflections of the authors’ own lives as they looked for affirmation and their place in the world.

For the last quarter century, Houston native Arden Eversmeyer journeyed across the country to record hundreds of oral "herstories" with a mostly invisible population that is rapidly disappearing. Old Lesbians honors Arden's legacy by animating the resilient, joyful voices she preserved in the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project, from first crush to first love, from the closet to coming out, and finally from loss to connection.

At the height of the Cold War, President Eisenhower deems homosexuals to be security risks. A vicious witch hunt ensues, ruining thousands of American lives.

A story of the LGBT struggle from the 1960s to the present, after the Stonewall riot sparked the militant action in New York that was to spread around the world. From San Francisco to Paris via Amsterdam, between the first Gay Pride, the election of Harvey Milk, the French "decriminalization", the AIDS epidemic and the first homosexual marriages, these few decades of struggle are embodied through numerous testimonies of actors and actresses of this revolution rainbow.