How I Love You is an exploration of sexuality among gay men in Lebanon. A couple and three individuals talk about their sex lives, about commitments and failures, about their relationships to their bodies, about their passions and love in a society where homosexuality is still punished by imprisonment. The video uses light to produce a white veil that obstructs seeing, hence rendering character identification almost impossible. Through this obstruction, the video locates itself within a specific social context.
LGBTQ
You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.
As the AIDS epidemic took hold in the early 1980s, self-help guru Louise Hay created a space for healing called the Hayride. Drawing hundreds of gay men confronting a deadly and stigmatized disease, Louise promised that they could overcome AIDS through self-love. Some said this early new age wellness movement was unscientific and harmful. Others who were suffering said that Louise healed them. In the face of a deadly pandemic and government neglect, resilience takes unusual forms, and for Louise Hay’s circle, intimate forms of reckoning were transformative.
In the dark night of a prairie city, a vampire considers her future with a fetching mortal. But requiring blood for sustenance brings a host of problems to the relationship.
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.
Perils is a homage to silent film—the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy—dramatizing the theatrical postures of melodrama to confront and examine our ideas of romance, action, and drama. Child says, “I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face.” Charles Noyes and Christian Marclay constructed the sound montage from Warner Brothers cartoons and improvisations.
Blumenthal constructs a loose narrative around the sexual evolution of a woman (played by Yvonne Rainer) through a stunning collage of images appropriated from TV and film. Certain images come to dominate this effusive stream—tall buildings, sex scenes, an Elvis movie, the courtroom, fireworks. Doublecross pits the indeterminate, disruptive power of the erotic against the rigid, normalizing structures of family, law, marriage, popular culture, movies, and music—societal institutions that codify sexual relations.
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven né Plotz, was an unsung member of the Dada Movement. A poet, artist, runaway, and all around public provocateur; she actively did not fit into her historical moment, and like most misfits, suffered for it. As with many women artists throughout history, her cultural legacy has been obscured and in some instances appropriated into the oeuvres of better known male peers.
Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.
Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, AIDS activist, and film and videomaker. His work, including Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), documents his personal experiences of testing positive and living with HIV within the context of a personal and global crisis. His writings are collected in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings:1986-2003.
A trip to a barren landscape of jagged peaks and deep crevasses becomes a playground for an over-dressed hiker and his beefcake buddy as they secrete and imbibe fluids from various containers.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Told through the voices of three elderly South Carolinian's who reside in the homes in which they were born, Steven Go Get Me A Switch is an oral history mapping dichotomies of gender, familial mythologies, sexuality, and belief. A heavy use of symbolism comingles with suggestions of narrative proof. The desire to be good and the impossibility of such desire becomes a sharp inaudible pitch, like a dog whistles call to violence.
In this video, Glennda and sex activist Chris Teen attend the opening of Dress Codes at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. They interview museum staff, artists, and other attendees to explore how an exhibition centered upon gender nonconformity will be received by both queer communities and the general public. Glennda and Chris Teen discuss the importance of visibility for marginalized communities, and tap into gender discourses as they existed in the early 1990s.
The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary.
“An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”
A mirror reflects voiceless eyes with stories to tell, ‘stories’ about feet attempting to climb steps to "perfection"....."stories" about canvasses that are traps for a caged artist who’s paint brush needs colors that will be at peace with itself.
This title comprises Angels We (2015), Feathered Hearts (2015), and Flesh and the Stars (2018) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Martí arrives in Bilbao for an artistic residency. His clothes take up only a small part of the huge wardrobe in his new room. When he meets someone, the wardrobe gradually begins to fill up. But where did the emptiness go, the free space, the little corner of his own? Did the wardrobe swallow it all, or was it love?
In Spanish and Catalan with English subtitles.
Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face protests against biometric facial recognition — and the inequalities these technologies propagate — by proposing the creation of “collective masks” that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of many faces, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies.
Child masterfully composes a rhythmic collage of symmetries and asymmetries in a fluid essay that forefronts the treatment of the body as a mechanized instrument — placing the body in relation to the man-made landscape of factories, amusement parks and urban office complexes. Vocals performed by Shelley Hirsch.
Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.
In Glennda and Bruce Do Times Square, Glennda is taken on a night tour of Times Square by author Bruce Benderson. They observe the dynamic between forms of culture that would typically be identified as “underclass” in “suburbanite” culture within the economic and spatial landscape of New York City. Glennda and Bruce visit the apartment of performer Consuela Cosmetic, who was prolific within New York’s ball scene. She maps out the ways in which she believes gender can be expressed, and discusses the implications of ‘passing’.
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.