A fast-talking and fabulous teen recounts his experiences as an out and loud Toronto queer. With catty wit, he recalls his confrontations with straight students at school and his gay prom at a Toronto gay youth community center, told with a flair for drama and punctuated with enactments of his Wonder Woman fantasies. Fung keeps the format simple, giving voice to his subject.
The two-part video Gender Cruise on the Circle Line involves Brenda and Glennda leading a group of drag queens, drag kings, and other gender nonconforming people on a three-hour ride on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan.
This sumptuous Valentine sent by Miss Philly unfolds with the lavish lushness of love for HIM whom she adores.
Five prayers are sent skyward, and five curses get directed inward by those living in the purgatory of "modern life"... Attend this moody Mass in the church of "thoughts and feelings"... It will uplift you.
This title comprises Wrestling with Angels (2015), Hiding Places (2016), Unfinished Paradise (2018), Late Night Blues (2016) and Nightscape (2017) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Brokenhearted, a young lesbian considers doubling her dating possibilities.
Every Wandering Cloud is the first installment in a series of experimental videos inspired by the writings of Oscar Wilde. Interweaving text from Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" with hand-drawn animation derived from Eadweard Muybridge's Human and Animal Location, Every Wandering Cloud is a meditation on themes of freedom and imprisonment. The video juxtaposes an eclectic array of archival and contemporary imagery, including documentary footage and original Super-8 and digital video.
Part of a campaign initiated in 1989, this video is a component of Gran Fury’s plan to raise consciousness and advance medical and federal reform on AIDS policy. These ads ran on TV as a counterpart to controversial bus posters, which generated some intensely negative reactions. Using Benneton’s "United Colors" ad campaign to a decidedly different end, simple but powerful images and modern text deliver an enlighteningly direct message.
This sun-drenched meditation contemplates on a youth's journey towards self discovery and his role in a new age.
Two potential saints struggle against the Moon’s pull on their libidos. In this battle, the midnight "sinners" confess secrets that reveal a truth that justifies their bodies and unites their souls.
This title comprises Moon-Tide (2015) and Soul Catcher (2017) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
A pro-domme gives her friend a freshly shaved head. In return she gets a buzz cut. A client gets to be a (bound) fly on the wall.
This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.
In the video An Evening with Kembra, Glennda and Brenda attend one of Kembra Pfahler's dinner shows on New York City's Lower East Side. At her show, she performs cabaret versions of songs from her band The Volumptuous Horror of Karen Black. After the show, the group discusses the relationship of her work to queer culture. Interspersed throughout the video are two short clips: a skit entitled Drag Queen Starter Kit, and a call to boycott a bakery due to its discriminatory behavior.
Shifting Positions is a semi-autobiographical/fictional trilogy exploring becoming queer later in life, my father's dementia, and our mid- and end-of-life crises. The selling of our family home of forty years prompted the making of the first section, entitled 'Last Home', which investigates the ways memories and spirits inhabit a house. In the remaining two sections— 'Napping' and 'Behavior Of Fascination'—the relationship between father and daugther is looked at through 'home movies' and documented intimate moments of private life. —Kathy High
Shot in the style of a silent film from the 1920s, Frida & Anita is a political fantasy, intersecting the lives of two queer radicals — Frida Kahlo and Anita Berber — who happen to meet one fateful Berlin night in 1924 at the infamous La Garcon Cabaret.
This tape was originally an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, part of which included the video collaboration Channels of Desire. Recreating coin-operated porno booths, Channels aired one photo image on seven TVs, interrupted only by the viewer inserting a coin and choosing a segment. The concept behind it was the construction of desire in categorical ways, the form of the piece speaking to sexual desire as something that is constantly evading the viewer. The images present women’s experiences with interracial, lesbian, and heterosexual encounters.
In this video, Brenda Sexual, Glennda Orgasm, and friends act out a drag queen murder mystery that takes place on their talk show. Later, they attend the Queer Fashion Army Invasion, a sit in of openly queer public fashion performance outside the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Then, the pair arrives at a video store to discuss queer undertones of Hollywood films, like Grease, Rocky II, and Yentil.
My Failure to Assimilate muses on the profound sense of melancholy that sets in after the end of a relationship. The tape uses poetry, songs, collage, interviews, and narrative elements to construct a complex picture of the resulting loss of direction and loss of identity. The tape is organized into three sections: Part 1: 'Schizophrenia'; Part II: 'Alienation'; and Part III: 'True Self'. Central to the question of identity is the interplay between imaginary and symbolic identification.
—Maria Troy and Thompson Owen
In the Queen City is a series of three videos shot in Buffalo, New York that were produced following an invitation from Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center as part of their Ways In Being Gay festival.
An episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, hosted by Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm. Production Support Provided by Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center.
Year of the Spawn is an archival collage inspired by the synonymous song by the “gay church folk” band The Hidden Cameras. Wolf interpreted the song as an anthem for doomed youth. Having recently finished the historical film Teenage, Wolf collected over 100 hours of archival footage, featuring early 20th Century adolescents. Much of these historical newsreels feature bizarre and mysterious outtakes. These forgotten scraps became the fabric for this foreboding and melancholic music film.
Blood percolates beneath the hot skin of sweat soaked men as they wrestle with primal urges that rip open hearts, tie the gut in knots and turn emotions inside out. With tortured mind the men must choose a future of "anger", or the warm "sweetness" that hides within their injured souls.
In 1995 when TJ Cuthand was 16 they felt like the only lesbian at their Saskatoon high school. This turned out to be untrue, but the lack of visibility in their high school coupled with the lack of representation of Queer teenagers in the 90's made their video, a comedic short about teenage lesbian loneliness and trying to bribe classmates to come out with the promise of candy.
“The second in a planned trilogy of films about desire and domesticity that began with Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017), Come Coyote examines issues around queer reproduction, intimacy, and motherhood. Collaborators and partners Dani and Sheilah ReStack capture in fleeting, diaristic images the tender and terrifying feelings they have around ushering new life into the world, conveyed with both humor and a powerful immediacy."
— Projections at NYFF, 2019 catalogue
Putting the Balls Away is a reenactment of the historic September 21, 1973, tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, created for broadcast on the 35th anniversary of the original event. The Battle of the Sexes was the most-watched live sporting event at that time, and pitted chauvinist against feminist, when women tennis players demanded equal pay to that of their male counterparts. Both players are performed by Mateik, whose work wages strategic operations to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. After each game the competitors "switch sides".
Distracted Blueberry follows a performance art band through a series of poetic encounters. Masculine tropes are undone to form a relationship between male sexuality and the human death drive. The body, violence and humour are positioned in the larger context of nothingness and somethingness, bridging a tension between externalized anxieties and the terrors of nature. Evocative of inner emotional states, strange landscapes exist as reflections of our shared dreams and nightmares.
Viewer discretion advised
Based on a Swedish folk tale, The Sausage tells the humorous story of two sisters, three wishes, and a calamitous obsession with a sausage. The Sausage is the first completed episode of Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale series presenting gender fluid adaptations of classic tales.
Tom Kalin is a screenwriter, film director, producer, and educator. As a key figure in New Queer Cinema, his work focuses on the portrayal of gay sexuality both in the age of AIDS and historically. Informed by his work with two AIDS activist collectives, ACT UP and Gran Fury, Kalin’s video work is characterized by appropriated images, original portraits, and performances.
