 follows a big boned butcher into skirmishes, drag, and the arms of a beautiful recruit. The public and private lives of this "strange animal" are explored with the reverence and glee found in the educational exposés like Reefer Madness and bad-boy films like Rebel without a Cause. However, because this fictionalized lesbian history is a first-person narrative, it is filled with all the joy, pain, and ambivalence each of us experiences while negotiating a marginalized identity. 

Winner of second prize at the 1995 United States Super 8 Film and Video Festival and the 1997 Manitoba Motion picture Association Blizzard Award for “Best Experimental.” (Super 8 finished on video transfer)

For more information about Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, see shawnadempseyandlorrimillan.net. For distribution information, contact vpdist@videopool.org.

To support artist-made video production, go to 

A Day In The Life of A Bull-Dyke

An experimental documentary about the journey from butch dyke to trans man, visual time lapse photography of the filmmaker's beard growing in over a 21 day period in the 1992 when the filmmaker was a butch dyke with a beard, catches up with a poetic v.o. and text ten years later, in 2002, recorded and added to the film as the filmmaker was transitioning to male.

 was shot on my beloved Bolex camera. The film was conceived as a time-lapse documentary film experiment with shots of this once butch dyke filmmaker's beard growing in over a 21-day period in the early 1990's.


At the time it felt like it was a very transgressive act as an artist, transitioning gender, to grow the beard I had felt ashamed of for so many years, using my body to tell a story, coming to terms with the shame of being born Intersex in a creative and empowering way. Ten years later, in 2001, a potent voice over written and performed by the filmmaker after my transition from female to male was added; the film is an experimental documentary account of a butch dyke's journey to trans man, succinctly summing up the complexity of this journey in under 2 minutes. 

 was named one of the ten best trans films by Curve magazine.

Audrey’s Beard

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicentre of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community.


Michelle Handelman’s provocative and pioneering documentary 

 captures these queer outlaws in their zeitgeist moment, shot on digital video with an unfiltered rawness that mirrors the activism of the era. From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, 

 immerses the viewer in the San Francisco leather dyke scene, shattering assumptions about gender and lesbian sexuality, while broadening the discussion about personal expressions of eroticism and their political implications. In the 1990s, 

 was attacked in congress by the American Family Association for its depictions of radical lesbian sexuality.


Twenty-five years later, the film has become recognized as a treasured historical document of a movement that tore down barriers of sex, gender, and activism.

BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes & Sadomasochism

Single-channel video, 3 min
VHS transferred to DVD, b/w, without sound

In this most militant piece, Cabello/Carceller appropriate the word "bollera", used as an insult for lesbians, and literally embody it: the two of them defy the categorisation involved in scrutinising another person’s face in a film portrait of the duo each eating a "bollo", or creampuff. By reappropriating the insult, one of the queer strategies par excellence, and liberating it from its erstwhile moral charge they make it once again a personal identifiable adjective.

Cabello/Carceller realizan su pieza más militante, donde se apropian del insulto bollera, referido a las mujeres lesbianas, encarnándolo de forma literal: ambas desafían la categorización que implica escrutar el rostro ajeno en un retrato fílmico del dúo comiendo un bollo cada una. La reapropiación del insulto, liberándolo de la carga moral tradicional para volverlo un adjetivo identificable como propio es una de las maniobras queer por antonomasia.

Bollos

Two San Francisco FTM transexuals sit in their back yard and discuss their daddy/boy relationship, transgender life, love, tattoos and tomato plants.

Boys in the Backyard 

A girl gang terrorizes and titillates girls with long hair.


Written, directed, edited and produced by Myra Paci


Cast: Cassis Henry, Katrin Hilbe, Myra Paci, Jennifer Payson, Amy Russell, Spencer Snygg

Butch Patrol

 is a portrait of trans activists Leslie Feinberg and Riki Anne Wilchins who lead a movement to end a trans-exclusionary women's music festival.

 (created by Rhys Ernst, produced by Christine Bebe and presented by Focus Features), 

Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco, CA

Mezipatra Queer Film Festival, Czech Republic

Camp Trans 

is an experimental film exploring the desire for transmasc, transmen, butch, stud, Agressives, masculine of center (MOC) people assigned female at birth. Stunning black and white images drift across the screen while transmen, femme women and butch and MOC people speak about the complexity of their desire. The soundtrack is by Campbell L Sangster. Animation is by Neelu Bhuman.

DES!RE

A short, playful, sexy video about a butch dyke/trans professor in teacher education.

Dancing on a Rainbow: Notes from a Butch Prof

Inspired by Hal Fischer’s book “Gay Semiotics”, 

 is a moving image study of queer visual coding.


Specifically leaning into the stereotypical queer looks of pre 2000's. Focusing on queer signifiers such as a set of keys clipped to the jeans, leather lace up boots, a blue handkerchief peering out from the back left pocket etc. Individually these things don't read as "queer" but when you put them all together, it’s a visual language and a way to communicate. 

I used some old lighting I had to create a kind of "nightclub atmosphere. I filmed in my cat enclosure to give the vibe of an outdoor smoking area of a club. To stabilise the camera, I employed an old council bin. i also used this to position the lighting. When I wasn't using the council bin to help film, I was using my own body. Even laying on the ground to get the specific shots I wanted. Every shot filmed was intentional. The only variable in the film was the pattern of the lighting. I utilised tilting, close ups and a LOT of zooming. The process behind that was to create a sense of disjointed viewing through
"mechanical eyes".

Double Denim Blues

Hermannplatz subway station, Berlin Neukölln. A FagDyke is looking out for a hook-up. Cruising. Soon they are spotting a cool leather dyke and follow her right away. When their eyes meet it’s clear what has to happen now — but when they find each other in an abandoned and filthy attic everything happens quite differently than expected… but super hot for sure! 

This film explores the boundaries between pure lust, intimacy, and trust in an anonymous sexual encounter with BDSM dynamics: it celebrates the thrill of lesbian cruising in the Berlin leather scene and also the visibility of non-binary and aging bodies. Where are they in queer porn?

FagDyke Cruising

A well-placed kielbasa stirs up comic confusion from Castro Street to the inner sanctum of the Left-handed Lithuania Lesbian Collective in late Bay Area filmmaker Ingrid Wilhite’s playful spoof of gender and sexual boundaries.

Fun With A Sausage

 follows a day in the life of a black French lesbian in San Francisco. Ifé loves women, but vows never to fall in love. As she extols the beauty of women in San Francisco, she slowly cruises the city's streets in her classic car. Her philosophy: "You can never experience too many women." This stylized short is both sex-positive and slick.

Ifé

Utilising modes of queer bodily abjection and subversions of concrete poetry, 

attempts to explore relations between mimetic aversions of both bodily autonomy and visibility and trans depiction in everyday life and work.

A swell can be defined as “a long often massive and crestless wave or succession of waves often continuing beyond or after its cause” or as something “(especially of a part of the body) become[s] larger or rounder in size, typically as a result of an accumulation of fluid” or “a full or gently rounded shape or form.” In “In the Field There is Swell,” I experiment with language use to distort traditional meanings of certain words or phrases and tropes, and here in particular, that of a swell, typically associated with descriptions of water or bodies of water.


This short film can be thought of as a poem with three verses in which a figure, myself, enters the frame, and seemingly doing not really anything at all, moves around awkwardly, almost attempting at times to move; uncomfortable and silly.


What is a body? What is a queer body? How might a queer body interact with space? What would this space look like? In a blue void a figure moves. In a blue void a queer figure moves. In a blue void a queer figure moves whilst wearing ridiculous (re-dyke-culous?) clothing, language and words interacting with the blue void, with the slow gentle music, within the space and its spacelessness and thus bodilessness; each silly phrase or word slowly taking on new and different and strange meanings. What does it mean to work?


I think in many ways this film has become about slowing down. When I initially began editing, the track I had composed was not quite long enough and thus I slowed it down by 50%, creating a sort of haunting, melodic, American Western-esqu e track that thumps and twangs and hums and groans, toying with the first clip of a “cowboy” shooting a gun at the camera, at the viewer.
Further, each verse has also been slowed down as well; the body’s movements becoming choppy, meaningless, and liminal; as if a delay between the body and the act of seeing the body has occurred.

In the Field There is a Swell

(Editors note: TJ Cuthand now uses he/him pronouns, however to respect the artists' integrity his original synopsis has been included below)

In 1995 when TJ was 16 she felt like the only lesbian at her Saskatoon high school. This turned out to be untrue, but the lack of visibility in her high school coupled with the lack of representation of Queer teenagers in the 90's made her make her first video, a comedic short about teenage lesbian loneliness and trying to bribe classmates to come out with the promise of candy.

TJ Cuthand is a filmmaker and performance artist, writer and curator of Plains Cree as well as Scottish and Irish descent. He is credited with coining the term Indigiqueer, for modern Indigenous LGBTQ people. 

Lessons In Baby Dyke Theory

Five years after the making of the video portrait Boys in the Backyard, the film maker returns to San Francisco to see what has become of Matt. Articulate and charming, Matt recounts some of his experiences as a transgendered FTM and changes in his life during the last five years..

Matt

'Then you lit a cigarette and carefully put the tip of it to the corner of the photograph and watched it smoulder and curl…’ 

is a sexy dyke film made the day after two women met at the Clit Club.

Sex Lies and Religion

 chronicles the sexual pursuits of Shae Clarke, an African American lesbian. Clarke, played by Dunye herself, defines and readily demonstrates her "new approach to women." Dunye cleverly combines humor and storytelling to relay a tale of adventure and conquest within the realm of sexuality.

) is currently organising a fundraiser for medical costs. You can visit the fundraiser and donate 

She Don't Fade

A Hi-8 video documentary short on Lesbian Gender Bending culture by Swordfish Productions, Berkeley

Best of Festival - Documentary 2004 Premiere San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2003

Strap ‘Em Down! The World of Drag Kings

TALL IN THE SADDLE: COWGIRLS, RANCH WOMEN & RODEO GALS 

is a Hi-8 video documentary short on cowgirls. 

- Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame, Hereford, TX, WPRA 

– Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, Colorado Springs

- CO & International Gay Rodeo Association, Denver, CO. 

- Hi–8 video documentary Human Rights Campaign concert & LGBT march. 

Won Best of Festival - Documentary 2004 EQUALITY ROCKS-MILLENNIUM MARCH. 

Tall in the Saddle: Cowgirls, Ranch Women & Rodeo Gals

, each video's running time is approximately 6 minutes, all videos are animated in a fashion that is very much "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, as told from the point of view of a transgender youth in rural Cape Breton. 

Alec’s animated video trilogy about growing up 2Spirit called Misadventures of Pussy Boy has been screened at numerous film festivals, including TranScreen: International Transgender Film Festival in Amsterdam, where it won the Audience Favorite award. Rough Paradise, a novella about growing up trans/intersex/2spirit in a rough working-class neighborhood, was published in 2014.

Each video was animated by hand, the backgrounds were created like theatre backdrops, with the characters hand-painted and cut out, performing each scene in front of the matching background for the scene. Camera work involved shooting each shot for 3-5 seconds and then manipulating the characters for the next shot over and over again, for hours, then editing the shots together and recording the voice over and music track. These videos are the epitome of "handmade", they were literally a labor of love.

The Misadventures of Pussy Boy Trilogy

 fluctuates between fast and slow movements and methodologies of queer intimacy and lamentations of this idea of the home in relation to the queer body and vice versa.

My practice as of late has mainly centred around a science fictionalised exploration into trans-masc dyke-iness; a queer movement and bodily abjection in regards to searching for modes of home and unhomliness not based upon patrilineal spatialities of biological kinship. This has taken the form of a moving image work that “functions” as a sort of container, or maybe a digitised and chaotic sonic and video collage in which I have been
particularly focusing on the specifics of transition (pun intended); the harsh cut or fluid, pixelated merging of various clips. This has culminated in a piece of work that fluctuates between fast and slow movements and methodologies of queer intimacy and lamentations of this idea of the home in relation to the queer body and vice versa.

The Space Dykes and Other Adventures

, the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred — this appears as an interview conducted by the director between two trans men. The video, a trans man’s fantasy, opens with frank discussions, such as testosterone injection sites marked by tattoos, then leads to sex.

Content note: Rapid flashing lights occur in the film at minute 34:30 – end.

Transmasculine Hole of the Universe

created by co-conspirators Lina Bembe and Max Disgrace, invokes a queer past in to re-imagine a queer future, and was made in direct response to a lesbian film from 90’s London. At a time when physical spaces for dykes to freely express their sexuality in London is scarce, Tribute is a materialisation of this fantasy space in film form, enacted in the same historic cruising ground featured in the film it took inspiration from, in Stoke Newington.

Tribute 

is a short narrative video about five transgender guys who, after discovering an internet article announcing the availability of penis transplants, plot ways to raise over a million dollars for surgery.

, and to Busby Berkeley and Peter Berlin movies, this action-packed comedy starts with the boys’ uneasy experiences of life as a “guy without a dick,” then follows their rosy fantasies of life “post-transplant,” and the crazy lengths to which they go to obtain surgery money. Fun and colorful, 

provides insightful commentary on the tyranny of body parts and mainstream culture’s policing of maleness from a queer perspective.

Unhung Heroes 

What happens to butch dykes when their health fails and/or they die? There are some things that need to be considered in advance (cocks, exes, clothes…). I made this as a way to make light of my current situation.

Categories

Dyke