A queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago from the point of view of French writer Jean Genet. Along the way Genet will meet, amongst others, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, the Yippies, the Black Panther Party and the Chicago police force... Ultimately, the video is about the difficulty of aligning political and sexual desires.
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.
This is an over-the-top Video bouquet audaciously delivered by flamboyant "Pan" – like poets determined to paint the world pink.
Small-town friends watch fuzzy TV, play music, and venture to the video store. Mom bakes a cobbler. The filmmaker fucks his boyfriend in the bedroom above the kitchen.
Ascensor is an exploration of grief, longing and mysticism through a queer lens. It documents a syncretic ritual that culls from the magical reverberations in Mexican culture to process the unexpected loss of a dear friend. The repetition of the ritual eventually leads to the transcendence of physical space, transforming unrelenting ache into shining resilience.
Prefaces is composed of wild sounds constructed along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from a dialogue with poet Hannah Weiner. Child tells us, “The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations and subordination.” This tape serves as a pre-conscious preface to the parts that follow, whose scope and image bank are more narrowly defined.
This first "Frieda" collaboration between performance artists Barbara Lipp and Tom Koden and video artist Tom Rubnitz chronicles Frieda's rise from assembly-line worker in a box factory to singing superstar. Featuring rock-bottom production values and a sound track which includes the Brady Bunch kids' tune "Gonna Find a Rainbow".
In this episode of The Glennda and Brenda Show, Glennda and Brenda take over a public bus to protest discrimination and violence against queer people who are "out and outrageous". They pick up many other out and proud friends to stage this queer sit-in.
The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century.
"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."
— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018
Unlike other sectors of Romanian civil society who gained status after December 1989, the gay community struggled for many more years with a legal ban imposed by a conservative political class subservient to the Orthodox Church. Against this background, I planned to make a tactical video whose leitmotif was a pas de deux performed by two male dancers.
1933. Berlin. The last year of the Wiemar Republic. Through the lense of her personal "home movies", Leni Riefenstahl records a day in her life with a young Eva Braun.
Die Neue Frau is the third film in the The Surface Tension Trilogy, a three-part short film trilogy looking at queer artists living in Berlin during the 1920s. Shot on hand-processed 16mm film.
Based on a tale by Charles Perrault, Tom Rubnitz's The Fairies comes complete with frogs, princes, kind fairies, and evil stepsisters—all costumed à la Rubnitz. Featuring Sister Dimension as the fairy godmother, Michael Clark, and others, the tape playfully illustrates a familiar fairytale moral, as each person gets what they deserve. The evil girl spits up toads, while flowers and jewels emerge from the mouth of Matilda the Good, and a dancing prince carries her away.
The performance artist Stephen Varble spent the last five years of his life working on an epic, unfinished performance-turned-video titled Journey to the Sun (1978-1983). Only partially complete and under constant revision, this complex work combined Varble’s history of making costumes for performances with his fantastic stories involving metamorphosis and martyrdom. In 1982, Varble decided to make a “prelude” to Journey to the Sun, combining existing footage with new video taken in Riverside Park in New York City.
In response to the dominant impression that gay people are white people, Orientations aims to set the record straight on homosexual identity. More than a dozen men and women of different Asian backgrounds speak frankly, humorously, and often poignantly about their lives as members of a minority within a minority. They speak about coming out, homophobia, racism, cultural identity, sex, and the ways that being gay and Asian have shaped who they are.
This rapid-montage music video for John Sex’s song “Hustle with My Muscle” portrays the singer as a ladies’ man with ample endowment to share. “Can you handle all the man below my belt?” he provocatively asks.
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
A young man recovering from emotional wounds, defiantly re-enters the outside world that welcomes his return with all its abundant miracles.
Here are two short movies with one tall boy who is sometimes happy, sometimes sad and always reflective… He has something to share with you…..Watch and you’ll understand.
This title comprises The Boy Upstairs (2019) and The Guy Next Door (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Frances, a young Gay Indian (2 Spirit), played by Lacey Hill, is struggling with the aftermath of a gay basing. Through her friendship with her ex Jean, she gathers the strength to go out in public again. This video is a salute to the 70s and to Gay Indian movements which became 2Spirit/Indigiqueer communities.
Song performed by Lacy Hill.
Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place.
In Fagtasia Solstice, Brenda and Glennda attend a Radical Faerie event in New York City to commemorate the Summer Solstice. Through interviews with Faeries and footage of their walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, the group proposes to reclaim the city as a safe space for queer people, and discuss reorienting queer consciousness toward spirituality.
An episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, hosted by Brenda Sexual and Glennda Orgasm. Featuring the Radical Faeries. Thanks to Julie Clark and Dana Nasrallah.
Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage.
This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.
The Bus Stops Here is an experimental narrative about two sisters, Judith and Anna, plunged into depression by their struggle to gain control over their lives. Narrated by Judith’s counselor, The Bus Stops Here traps these women in a narrative in which their unmediated voices are rarely heard; instead, the viewer learns about them only through the interceding power structures of narrative, family, and psychiatric establishment.
An artist looses faith in the world his brush depicts... A "Romeo’s" wounded heart causes him to shun intimate connections with others, and a "poets" struggle with domestic situations hinder his ability to create words of beauty... See and hear it all for yourself.
This title comprises Indigo Moods (2018), Fallen Angels (2013), and The Alphabet Garden (2018) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Teramana spends time with drag performer Dainty Adore O’Hara (Mitchell Allan Marco) in Dainty’s apartment in New York City. Dainty, her friend, and Teramana exchange friendly, humorous banter as they flip through Dainty’s collection of photographs and artworks, and Dainty shows off her dress collection, many of which she made herself. The production date for this title is unknown, but presumed to have been recorded after 1991.
A Spy is a gender-bending and thought-provoking mixture of pure visual pleasure with disturbing undercurrents. As Reeve lip-syncs to a Doors song (“I am a spy in the house of love. I know the dream that you’re dreaming of, I know your deepest secret fear...”), we see a new manifestation of Jesus walking in a video field of pulsing rainbows, amoebic forms, and B-movie girls in black panties — suggesting the desires we try to hide from ourselves and others.
