A Rich Counterhistory of Masculinities On-Screen

As you were programming, did you discover that a thematic or aesthetic through line was emerging?

Olson: One thing all these films have in common is that they are foregrounding gender-nonconforming people who are heroic and courageous, sometimes by just literally being who they are. One of my favorites is the documentary Chavela. It’s a fantastic portrait of the gun-toting, tequila-loving, gender-nonconforming, Grammy Award–winning Mexican lesbian singer Chavela Vargas. I also love the documentary Lifetime Guarantee, whose main subject, Phranc, is a butch lesbian folk musician who becomes a Tupperware salesperson. She’s navigating a very conventional suburban American world as her charismatic, lovely self—and I identify with that. That’s how I go about my life. People may have fears and anxieties about us, but when they meet us, they’re like, oh, you’re just a very nice person!

 

I’d also like to emphasize that these are all cinematically interesting films. When I think of a movie like Maggots and Men, I think, wow, [the director] Cary [Cronenwett] did an incredible job paying homage to Sergei Eisenstein and silent cinema, and shooting this film on Super 8 and 16 mm. It’s conceptual, it’s engaging with cinema history in an exciting way, and it has a trans cast.

One other thing that comes up for me while watching these movies together is the way they show how our understandings of identities and categories and terminologies have changed over time, and will continue to change. I think of someone like the activist and writer Leslie Feinberg, who was this larger-than-life figure in the queer community. Leslie was a butch dyke, took T [testosterone], had top surgery, and lived as a man. But then they stopped taking T and became a gender-nonconforming person who used all kinds of pronouns, including “she” and “ze.” Leslie totally identified as transgender, but it’s important to note how the meanings of that word have changed over time. This series embodies that spirit.

Gardner: When we were programming this, I thought about how sometimes fiction films and documentaries dealt with this subject differently. By Hook or by Crook is intentional about not categorizing its main characters, Shy and Valentine. Meanwhile, in Southern Comfort, the subjects are wrestling with the ways they want to identify themselves, and some of them use terms that were prevalent primarily in the medical field. Both those movies played at festivals in the early 2000s, and I found the differences between them to be very revealing; they show how identity can be spoken and unspoken. In Southern Comfort, trans identity is an unavoidable topic, because the film’s subjects need to put into words how they’re being denied gender-affirming care and being discriminated against within medical institutions. In By Hook or by Crook, on the other hand, Shy and Val never expound on their identity because they are still working through it, even as we sense, just from how they exchange glances, that they are instantaneously and implicitly acknowledging they’re cut from the same cloth.

Jenni, you were a consulting producer on By Hook or by Crook. What was it like to see that film make its way in the world?

Olson: It’s interesting to remember the moment when that was made. In all the original program notes for that film, the characters were labeled as butch dykes, even though they refer to each other with male pronouns. The movie throws you into their world and doesn’t make them explain themselves. And that’s also true of Stud Life, a comedy-drama about a Black butch wedding photographer in London, and of the documentaries The Aggressives and Shinjuku Boys, which each follow a group of gender-nonconforming AFAB subjects who identify in a variety of ways. These are films made for us and by us, and the point is not to cross over. Queer audiences see these films and they’re like, cool, here we are. Don’t explain anything to us; just be you. There’s something similar at work in Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy too. At least in the way I read that film, the young protagonist goes on this journey, and at the end of it, the viewer doesn’t know what path that person will take—they could grow up to be a trans man or a butch dyke . . .

 

Gardner: Or a femme who happened to be engaging in a kind of gender exploration when they were young.

There’s also a specificity in the historical periods represented within the series. I think of No Ordinary Man, a documentary about a trans man who comes from an earlier generation, a time when people withheld their identities to the point where they became widely known only after their deaths, making these people vulnerable to being completely misrepresented. The film’s subject is the American jazz musician Billy Tipton, who had some success as a bandleader starting in the 1930s and whose friends and family, for the most part, didn’t know he was trans. It’s speculated that he could have had an even more notable career than he had, but the risk of being outed at the time had Tipton take himself out of the music business. The film shows the ugly ways that, after his identity was revealed, he became tabloid fodder. Viewers can watch the movie and think, we’re obviously better than this, right? But now we’re seeing on a daily basis how public officials disrespect and dehumanize trans people, cross-dressers, drag queens, and other gender-nonconforming groups, and we have to reckon with the fact that, no, we aren’t better than this.

Many of these films are quite obscure. How many did you already know before you began programming?

Olson: There are some brand-new films—the shorts Monsieur Le Butch and Pete are really great, and they’re both from 2022—but I did already know about most of these movies because of my background as a curator. Many of the films from the early nineties were ones I came to know when I was working as a codirector of the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival and then later at Wolfe Video. But so many of them have not been widely seen in a very long time. Lifetime Guarantee, for instance, won the audience awards at SXSW and Outfest, and then basically went undistributed. And the Brazilian film Vera—that was released in 1986 and came out on VHS some years later. We’re showing that movie in a great new restoration that was made a few years ago. By Hook or by Crook is in the process of being restored, and Alamo Drafthouse will be presenting it. And Shinjuku Boys is being worked on by the UCLA Film and Television Archive; its original negative was sadly chucked out of a London lab years ago. We’re indebted to the work of film archivists and institutions that do this work. One of the exciting things about a series like this is that it’s getting more interest for these films and putting things into motion.

Gardner: I initially looked at Vera and thought how unfortunate it was that, despite its premiere at one of the big world-cinema festivals [Berlin], it didn’t become better known. But while researching my book with my writing partner, Willow Maclay, I was looking through archival materials of trans newsletters in the Digital Transgender Archive, where I found reviews of the film, including one by trans activist Rupert Raj in a newsletter he ran called Gender Networker. That showed me that highly respected members of the trans masc community were very aware of the film after its release. Raj praised Vera for showing how the trans protagonist—whose name is Bauer in the film, though he is represented by his deadname in the title—deals with people who are failing him, who are not affirming him or assisting him in getting the care that he needs. I thought these reviews were an incredible find. History isn’t static; sometimes it may seem like something doesn’t exist, but then, over time, materials emerge. Vera may not have been known in a mainstream way, but it’s not something that just came and went either. It was playing queer and trans festivals through the nineties, and it was in the community’s consciousness.