Saturday, June 22, 2024, 6:00 PM, New Parkway Theatre
plus Digital Screening Room streaming encore
(within California only)
⚠️Content advisory: contains nudity and discussions of sexuality, but no explicit depictions.
 |
| Desire Lines |
There are transgender men (in outdated terms, “female-to-male”) who sexually desire cisgender gay men. Among the first people ever to talk about this issue, at least from a first-person perspective, was Lou Sullivan, who was very public about being trans, about being into gay men, and ultimately about having HIV/AIDS (something he viewed as an ironic counterpoint to all the gender clinics and others who told him that he couldn’t possibly function as a gay man).
Jules Rosskam had a short, “Dance, Dance, Evolution” in the Frameline Showcase 2020 program “Transtastic”; unfortunately, I didn’t get any reviews onto the blog from that Showcase. Rosskam is back with a “docu-fiction” hybrid, combining archival interviews, papers, and photos, plus some contemporary interviews and a fictional scenario in which Ahmad, an Iranian-American transgender man, is doing research on the subject in the LGBTQ+ archives, and he and archivist Kieran are transported back to the 1980s bathhouse scene. The current interviews (including Frameline’s own Sam Berliner) talk openly about their experiences with cis gay men, the joys, the frustrations, the fetishization, the rejection and prejudice, and the new sexual frontiers they’ve explored.
Trans men who seek sex with men are a community at a too often ignored intersection within the LGBTQIA+ rainbow. This film is a compelling document of their experiences, powerfully told in their own words. It’s definitely a MUST SEE. If you live outside California, I won’t tell anyone if you use a VPN to see it here.
No comments:
Post a Comment