Desert Hearts: the outlook is grim for lesbian films in theaters this summer. Best to curl up at home with the classic that changed everything.

Death or a threesome: That's how most movies with a lesbian love angle ended before Donna Deitch made Desert Hearts, the classic 1986 romance that's being re-released this June on a two-disc, extras-filled DVD from Wolfe Video.

"I'd seen all the obvious films," says Deitch, "The Killing of Sister George, The Fox, The Children's Hour, Madchen in Uniform," (For the record, that's two threesomes, one death by falling tree, one suicide, and one attempted suicide.) "I thought there was something really embarrassing and inauthentic about previous scenes of sexuality between women," says Deitch. "I wanted to make a believable love story between two women that did not end in a bisexual triangle or a suicide."

The sex scene in Desert Hearts between free-spirited young artist Cay and uptight English professor Vivian still ranks as one of the most scrumptious ever. And the picture's stars, Patricia Charbonneau and Helen Shaver--both interviewed by Deitch on the new DVD, which also includes the director's dailies of their famous horizontal encounter--remain lesbian favorites.

"I still get fan mail every week," says Shaver, now a director as well as an actor. "Alan Alda [with whom she performed on Broadway in 1992] used to tease me about my 'stage-door Joanies.' There were some fabulous women at the stage door offering me jewelry!" Adds Charbonneau: 'Women sent me photos of themselves lounging against Corvettes," echoing images from the film. "It was nice to get letters from younger women who were at a real turning point in their lives and felt free to express those feelings to me."

At the time Desert Hearts was shot, indie films were still novelties--the Sundance Institute had been founded just five years before--and there weren't yet the many distribution options that now exist with the Internet and Netflix.

Both Shaver and Charbonneau had been told they'd be crazy to take a role requiring them to nakedly play gay. 'We were so before lesbian chic," says Shaver, who met her husband, Steve, while he was crewing on Desert Hearts. Today, in comparison, few actresses haven't kissed a woman onscreen, says Charbonneau. "Go back to 1985--we were gutsy back then." Charbonneau has two daughters (she was pregnant with one of them during the filming of Desert Hearts) and lives in a small New York town. She wonders why Ilene Chaiken hasn't yet cast her in The L Word. (Shaver appeared in two episodes during the first season.)

The real beauty of Desert Hearts lies in the fact that Deitch didn't just make a gay film that successfully crossed over into the mainstream. She instituted a whole new genre of lesbian films to come.

But why the continued resonance of this particular film? "A love story just has to work, whether lesbian or gay or straight," says Deitch, who has since directed episodes of shows including Crossing Jordan and NYPD Blue and TV movies such as The Women of Brewster Place, starring Oprah Winfrey. Most important, perhaps, she's writing a long-awaited sequel to Desert Hearts, set in the 1970s. "One of my primary considerations was that thing called chemistry--and when Helen first read with Patricia, it was palpable."