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Twenty-five years later, the film has become recognized as a treasured historical document of a movement that tore down barriers of sex, gender, and activism.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

A time capsule of an erotic queer gathering where the playful act of sitting on cake becomes a collective ritual, exploring desire, intimacy, and excess as modes of queer expression beyond normative boundaries.

CAKED

Inspired by the sacred and ancient relationship between Chaac, the Mayan deity of Rain, and Yum, the Mayan deity of corn, this short erotic drama tells a story about two queer, Mayan-descended Two-Spirits who meet at a queer San Francisco bar. Upon touching and dancing with one another they realize their connection is ancient.

Chaac + Yum

In the mid-1990s, the first openly lesbian bar in South Korea, LesBos, opened its doors in Sinchon, Seoul. This documentary follows one of the bar’s proprietors, Myong-woo, whose witty commentary prompts a broader reflection on Seoul’s lesbian scene, and the evolution of the city’s queer spaces over the past five decades. In her feature debut, Kwon Aram documents generational change as she makes connections between past and present: from the 1976 police raid on Chanel, a women-only café that existed in Myeong-dong in the 1970s, to the more recent threat posed by Covid-19 to community solidarity. This is a film about a shared sense of belonging, and shared environments of kinship. Offering a rare insight into Seoul’s often-hidden lesbian history, Home Ground reveals the vibrancy and endurance of South Korea’s queer culture.

Home Ground

speaks on her experiences as a lesbian in East LA and finding her home at Redz Bar. 

Nancy From Eastside Clover

is an introduction to and snapshot of a London-based QTIPOC (queer trans intersex people of colour) collective and clubnight by the same name. Laura Kirwan-Ashman was chosen by Converse as one of 25 young womxn across London to receive funding for a project of our choosing as part of their Spark Progress campaign.

Pxssy Palace

 is a short documentary on the intersections of drag, gender identity and queer community from the perspectives of six drag artists at varying stages in their careers.

For a copy of the film the artist has requested you contact them erynmcd [dot] creative [at] gmail.com

Queer Is A Tender Feeling

Filmmaker and bestselling author Vivek Shraya’s ode to a popular Edmonton gay bar that closed in 2007. With pulsating neon-light animation, Reviving the Roost is a story about community complexity and longing, and an elegy to a lost space.

Reviving The Roost

is an a̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ safe space, where collective practices are amplified through a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶n̶e̶r̶ monologue invoking other bodies that explore diversity & non-normative s̶e̶x̶u̶a̶l̶ practices ironising capitalism as a form of libidinal pleasure.

R̶A̶V̶E̶ 

In this meditation on trans sisterhood and Midwestern ennui, two tight-knit roommates (Mila and Fenyx) get ready for their night out. As they inject hormones, bicker, put on makeup, and smoke a little too much weed, we get an intimate glimpse into their loving—yet flawed—relationship.

Scouts Honor

'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

Charting the eight-year run of Shakedown, a peripatetic black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, director Leilah Weinraub attempts “to portray the before and after of a utopic moment.” Weinraub presents a world unto itself, shaped by the desires and pleasures of its community. Shot with the tenderness of a home movie, 

 captures the propulsive, dreamlike atmosphere of the club and achieves a stunning intimacy with its subjects.

Shakedown

An utterly fascinating, beautifully crafted exploration of the world of drag kings—women who dress, perform and/or live as men. 

Shot over a period of several years, we enter into the intimate lives of the film's subjects, Drag King pioneer Diane Torr, garbed as her alter ego Danny King, German performance artist Bridge Markland and in London, Del LaGrace Volcano a photographer whose startling images take us into a subculture of “new men” who experiment with male hormones.

Venus Boyz

In Lebanon, a country where the LGBTQ community still faces extreme discrimination, a scene is emerging that celebrates the identity, flamboyance and passion of its queer community.

It’s voguing, a dance style created in New York City in the 80s to create a safe space for LGBTQ people.

We meet dancer Hoedy Saad in Beirut to discover how, in the face of adversity, he's building a vogue scene in the Middle East to fight for freedom.

Vogue Beirut

In a post-apocalyptic future, an intergalactic explorer lands at an abandoned museum on a quest to find traces of his long-lost ancestors, and ends up being teleported to the dance floor of a Brazilian queer nightclub in the 1990s.

Vollúpya

 is a portrait of Silver Platter, a historic bar on the east side of Los Angeles that has catered to the Latin immigrant and queer community since 1963. With a touch of magical realism, the bar itself becomes a character in the film. Voiced by a transgender actress from Guatemala, it whispers the histories of the LGBT community from whom it has provided sanctuary and "safe space" for generations. 

The film captures the creativity that ensues when a group of young queer artists( Wu Tsang, Dj NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom) organise a weekly a performance party, also called Wildness, at the bar. This emergent underground interfaces with the emigrant trans women who have long populated the venue and the Silver Platter becomes a charged forum for forging coalitions and exploring class, community and activism.

Categories

Nightlife