by alexander schneider
click links for full films on youtube, vimeo, etc. (and one porn site... but hey, free rosa von praunheim)!
click links for full films on youtube, vimeo, etc. (and one porn site... but hey, free rosa von praunheim)!
Alexander Schneider: Do you both want to quickly introduce yourselves—what you do, your lives, and your projects?
K.J. Sheperd: Sure. Liz, you first, you’re famous!
Elizabeth Purchell: I’m not! No, shut up. Elizabeth Purchell. I’m a queer film historian and film programmer and filmmaker, and just film in general, I guess. I do too much. Cruising the Movies is a spinoff of a podcast that we used to do called Ask Any Buddy, which was a tie-in for a movie that I made, a few—five, six—years ago now, which was a gay porn found footage experimental piece. I somehow actually had a full festival run and Ask Any Buddy (2019) is still playing, which is incredible and weird to think about. It’s also a spinoff of a monthly queer film series that I do in Austin at the Austin Film Society called Queer Cinema, Lost and Found. It’s really just trying to dig up queer films that don’t really play that often. It’s either things that were obscure to begin with or things that have just become obscure over the years. I’d say the difference between the two is that in Texas, you can’t show sexually explicit films in a theatrical context, but in New York, you can.
KS: You have a lot of butts in New York.
EP: Even though we keep saying it’s not a porn series… we’ve shown a lot of stuff with unsimulated explicit sex, because why not?
KS: My name is K. J. Sheppard. I’m a writer. I’m a historian. I’m also the co-host of Cruising the Movies, both the show and the series, 5’10”, Leo, Pisces Rising. Ask Any Buddy, I was the editor and the producer of that, and now I’m in front of the glass with that.
AS: So, Ask Any Buddy. Could you talk about the genesis of it, how it came to be, what people are seeing when they watch it?
EP: It’s an outgrowth of work that I’d already been doing. I started an Instagram account year ago that was drawn from my research into the history of gay adult film industry. To me, it felt like this hidden queer cinema that no one really talked about or had been forgotten about, or it wasn’t reputable enough to be seriously considered. As part of that, I was going through all these magazines and newspapers and primary sources and periodicals and finding all this imagery that I found to be really inspiring and fascinating. The Instagram was a way of trying to take this material and recirculate it and bring it back out into the world, and to show that this stuff was actually treated like an actual cinema. These films were widely advertised. They were featured on the covers of magazines, and in newspapers like The Advocate, they were reviewed. The people who were in them became stars. The directors became stars.
KS: They had Variety coverage.
EP: Yeah, they were reviewed in Variety. The funny thing is that every gay porn director claims to be the first reviewed in Variety. They’ve been doing it from the get-go. The film just grew out of me wanting to try to get into programming in Austin and me being asked by a small local queer film festival, that was so small that it no longer exists, to make something for the fest. I think they wanted me to make a gay porn supercut of just the funniest or the best moments. I wanted something that I thought was more watchable and something that people would get into. I’ve always been interested in found footage and making new things out of old things. The film just grew out of there. The weird thing for me is that this was pre-transition, and now looking back on it, I see a lot of trans stuff in it. It’s changed meanings as the years have gone by.
KS: Wakefield Poole, who was the big director of Bijou and Boys in the Sand, and Wakefield Poole’s Bible—which is my favorite gay director does a straight thing, ever—was screening Bijou in Orlando. You had an interest in it, and then we went. We got in there and we saw it, and it was life changing. There’s this moment where this character who gets hit by a car shows back up 40 minutes later in a vision sequence, and you just see it, and you’re gripping the person next to you.
Also, it’s just hot as hell because there’s a lot of this gay sex. Then, Wakefield Poole is there, and he just had this soft, southern drawl. He’s there answering questions like this: “Oh, well, when I stopped freebasing, I decided to get out of gay porn.” Just make a bunch of films, do freebase (a.k.a. cooking cocaine into 100% purity and smoking it) all the time, have a weird tchotchke shop, and then get out of the business after a while.
AS: We’ve all been there.
KS: It was magical. That was just one thing I remember in terms of it stoking your interest, Liz—in getting that going.
AS: After it was made and it was out there, what was the response like?
EP: It was this weird thing where I didn’t expect it to go anywhere beyond that one screening for that festival. I was having some trouble getting some bookings. Then I saw that BFI Flair free submissions had just opened. On a whim, I submitted it just to see what happened, and it got in. That was the beginning of it starting to have an actual festival run because then it started getting into all these other festivals, and then COVID happened. BFI was one of the very first festivals to a, be canceled and b, move online. It was on the BFI Player. It was one of the very first virtual festivals. I’m glad I got fisting onto the BFI Player on Amazon Prime.
KS: Double fisting.
EP: Double fisting, thank you.
KS: Chariot fisting.
EP: Chariot fisting, yes.
AS: Thank God.
EP: It wasn’t until Frameline, the San Francisco Queer Festival in 2023, that I actually got to see it again with an actual audience in a theater. That was post-transition, four years after I made it.
AS: You mentioned was that you were noticing a lot of trans stuff. Looking back on it now, is that literal or is that more of a metaphor?
EP: I think at the time, part of the reason for that inclusion was me saying, “Oh, I have to have representation in here. I have to get this stuff in here.” But not to get too wanky or into theory or whatever, but I think of film as being a very trans-artistic medium because it is all about taking material and literally physically cutting it to make a story or to make something new. With a found footage film like this, it is literally cutting apart all these pieces of the past to make something pointing towards a future. So, I think just for that, it’s a trans movie.
AS: I love it. I just wanted to ask if either or both of you have been seeing anything good lately, any favorite pieces of queer media, any recent pieces of queer media you’ve watched?
KS: I don’t want to steal your thing, Liz, but I think one of my favorite queer things that I saw last year was Love Lies Bleeding. I mean, there’s something relatable about Kristen Stewart as someone with a mullet and a monotone solving a lot of problems really quickly, sometimes with the use of guns. I think that you can’t get to Love Lies Bleeding without Pumping Iron II, which I know has been a yearlong fascination that you’ve been championing, Liz.
EP: I mean, Love Lies Bleeding was probably my favorite new release of last year. I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but at this point, I mostly focus on older movies. I think enough has been said about the new trans cinema or whatever you want to call it, that brought it up last year. Those films were great. I worked on I Saw the TV Glow in a small capacity. The People’s Joker was something that I saw years ago when I was screening for Fantastic Fest in Austin, or when I was screening for SXSW in Austin. Then my friend Louise Weard’s four and a half-hour long castration movie is probably the new release film right now that I’m excited about because it is messy and sprawling and edge flirty, but in a good way that takes trans cinema in a lot of new directions that it’s taken way too long to get to.
AS: What’s the title of the... Is it “Castration Movie”?
EP: It is literally called Castration Movie, and it’s part one. Then the second I think also going to be four and a half-hours long.
AS: Okay, I’m ready. I’m seated. I’m waiting for that to come out.
EP: Louise has mostly been avoiding the festival circuit and just taking it straight to the people. She’s now doing theatrical screenings of it, and they all seem to be doing really, really well. I think there’s an audience for a four and a half hour-long, trans, edgelord movie, shot on Hi8 video, and she’s proving that there is. So that’s exciting to me.
AS: Are there any historical pieces of cinema that are your favorites that you’ve been rewatching?
EP: For the past year, I’ve been working with some friends who do a screening series in L.A. (called Hollywood Entertainment) on a big series celebrating the 45th anniversary of EZTV, which was one of the first video microcinemas. They were also not explicitly queer, but a queer video collective. They still exist, but they were founded in technically 1983, but they were really founded in 1979. I don’t like using the word discoveries, but one of my favorite things that I’ve come across is the work of this group called Video Free America, which is the Washington D.C. “chapter” of EZTV. These two gay guys in D.C. who worked for the federal government were just making political drag comedies, documentaries, poetry videos and things like that on video in the ‘80s. This stuff is so incredible, but it’s just so deeply obscure, especially because both of the men died of AIDS in the early ‘90s, and their work has just been in limbo ever since.
AS: Amazing.
EP: EZTV is something that’s just been completely forgotten about, even though what they did was so revolutionary. Excited to get it out there more.
AS: Tell us more!
EP: I think the thing with EZTV is that they’re just so hard to describe because they were never one thing. Even if you romanticize them as being the “video microcinema” or the “queer video collective,” that’s only a small part of the story because they still exist. They’ve been around for 45 years. The founder passed away from AIDS in 1983. After he died, it just very much changed into something completely different, but still vaguely connected to what it initially was. But it was this refuge for people who were wanting to learn about video in the ‘80s, and they provided the cheapest equipment rentals and editing rates in L.A. Through that, a lot of people who were trying to make gay porn were able to enter into the business, or people who wanted to make gay documentaries or gay comedies or gay horror films, found a home at EZTV. It’s a big, wide range of stuff. It’s not just video art or gay stuff or documentaries. It’s just everything, and that’s what’s exciting about it. I’m super excited.
AS: Let’s dive into a bit of your series, Cruising the Movies.
KS: You can cruise at the movies, but we’re not responsible. We are coming on a year of doing this. We’re at IFC Center, and it’s been a lot of fun. We’ve really tried to run the gamut without it being obnoxiously trying to get coverage. I think that allows us to bounce around in ways that are more playful than overthinking the math problem. I think the thing that’s most surprising is what brings people out. It’s just there’s no rhyme or reason sometimes. It’s just you can really think, this one’s going to be huge… then 20 people will show up, and then sometimes you’re like, yeah, let’s try this, and then it’s a full house. We did No Skin Off My Ass (as seen in PISS 1) which was Bruce LaBruce, and it’s really early on. Or when we did Araki’s first one, Three Bewildered People in the Night, where people were like, “Oh, Araki? Really, Araki?” Then you get a ton of people.
AS: We just had No Skin Off My Ass here in L.A. a few months ago, six months ago. It’s a packed house, of course.
KS: It’s absolutely packed. I think sometimes you sell it even more when you’re like, imagine some guy in Toronto who wants to just stick his nose in an unwashed skinhead’s ass, but also he’s obsessed with Robert Altman. I think that’s enough of a selling point, even if you don’t know Bruce LaBruce or whatever.
EP: The one that was the biggest flop was William Castle’s Homicidal for Halloween. I think partially because we didn’t show a print—we showed a DCP—but I don’t know.
KS: Everyone was on one. But then on the flip side, we also showed lesbian porn from Fatale Videos, lesbian for us by us, shot on video, porn stuff from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and that got a crowd. I think there is nothing that’s too much for the IFC audience. That’s what’s actually been really cool is that you can say, “We want to show this. You’re going to see fingers go inside places, and it’s going to be like late-80s lesbian styling.” People are like, “Yeah, I’m very about this. I’m going to sit here and watch this.”
EP: I was going to say the one that people actually did do some cruising during was the lesbian erotic night because we’d been in touch with the co-founder of the company, Nan Kinney and she drove down from Hudson to be at the screening. We asked her if she wanted to do a Q&A afterwards. She was like, “Let me think about it.” The morning of the screening, I got an email from her, and she says, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’ll do an intro, but I don’t want to do a Q&A after because I don’t want people to sit there and listen to me. I want them to go home and fuck each other.” I got a text from a trans woman from a few hours after the screening saying, “Went home and had a four-way. Thanks for that.”
KS: It wasn’t just that one, though. We showed Daddy Dearest. Then I went to see Hard Truths, the Mike Leigh film the next week. This guy keeps looking at me and I’m like, What is this guy? I’m like, What is going on? I’m watching Mary and Jean-Baptiste. What the fuck do you want? After it, this dude was like, “Are You, yada, yada, yada from yada, yada, yada?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Oh, great. Okay, great. I went to Daddy Dearest, and I brought this guy on a first date. After I brought him to this movie, we immediately went home and fucked.” I was like, “Great. Good!” Which means that it works as turning you on. Also, honestly, it works as what Bressan always wanted to do, which is, “I want you to fuck after watching this, but I actually want you to watch the entire film first. I put a lot of story into this.” I think it succeeded both with intent and interpretation.
AS: So, these screenings can be very inspiring, clearly.
KS: Look, go to the Unisex bathroom after. Who am I to judge? Please don’t. I don’t want to stop programming after this. Just go to one of the diners a block away!
AS: Or at least be discreet about it.
KS: Yeah. Hand jobs are pretty easy. Come on.
AS: How is the audience in general? Besides the super fun part, the cruising and stuff like that, how have they been? Have they been surprising you? Have they been mainly super queer?
KS: What’s been the most cool thing is seeing a wide range of people who are 40s, 50s, 60s, and then people who are, I’m guessing, early ‘20s. Everyone loves talking to Liz afterwards, though, so usually it’s easy for me to be like, I’m going to take a leak, and then zip downstairs while they swarm her and talk to her.
EP: I think queer film programming is the hardest programming because it’s not just one thing. It’s gay movies, lesbian movies, bisexual movies, trans movies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The difficult thing is to try to get people from all these different letters of the alphabet to come to see stuff on a regular basis and to take chances when it isn’t “their month.” When we showed Gordon Willis’s Windows, which is the lesbian version of William Friedkin’s Cruising, very controversial film, I really was I was hoping that we’d have a really strong female lesbian turnout, but instead it was mostly cis gay dudes. I was hoping that having a bunch of women there would give the screening a bit of a campness to it because it is a very funny, over-the-top portrayal of evil, predatory lesbians.
KS: It was like an alien wrote the script. It’s fucking bizarre. I love it, but it’s a bizarre movie.
EP: My goal with this stuff is to try to make it approachable, but also not easy or safe. We’re not just showing Paris is Burning and Go Fish month after month. That’s the stuff that should be playing year round anyways, not our one screening a month. I think we do get a lot of repeat audiences, but I do want it to try to build it and make it sustainable. That’s always the challenge.
AS: What do you have coming up next? I know you have Transsexual Menace, Rosa von Praunheim, if I’m not mistaken.
KS: Yeah, Rosa is a patron saint of the show. Actually, Liz and Rosa are pals.
AS: No way!
KS: Well, yeah, they talk to each other. It’s actually fun because Liz will ask for permission to see the film or just chat, and then Rosa will reply, “Yes, just look.”
EP: We’re showing my 35 millimeter print of Frank Simon’s The Queen.
KS: Probably a rare chance to not see it in potato quality because I think…
EP: No, it’s not potato quality! There’s a 4K restoration.
AS: Has there been anything that you haven’t had the opportunity to show that you’d love to one day?
EP: There’s a lot of stuff that I wanted to show over the years. It’s rights and materials that are the issue. There’s a 35 millimeter print at an archive that I get a lot of stuff from of this movie, I What I Want, which is one of the first trans-centric transition stories. It’s a controversial film. I know a lot of people really hate it, but I think it’s really well done. I can get the print, but I can’t get the rights.
KS: I mean, mine are not super surprising. I want everyone to watch Macho Dancer on a big screen. I want to show Lianna, the psychological thriller. I always have this weird itch up my ass to show Personal Best and talk about the Hemingways. Anything else that I always want to really show touches up against Desert Hearts or Parting Glances territory, where it’s just touching the edge of people rediscovering it enough that we don’t need to be the venue for them. Even though every year there’s going to be new children who are discovering those things, and it’s not as overplayed as your Paris is Burning, Cruising the Movies is maybe not a 101 type lesson, it might be 301. But those might be things that they can self-discover rather than really hard for you to find.
AS: There’s levels to it.
KS: Again, this is not even to discredit people who program those 101 things. Again, A, it’s art, B, these things need to be seen, and C, it’s someone’s first time seeing it. But where do we fit best in? It’s more of those deeper cuts.
EP: But also, just living in, I hate to say it, but the greatest film city in the world where this stuff is always playing, it is this constant balance of when was the last time this played in New York and how do we make the screening special?
AS: Speaking of the right moment and timing—I don’t want to get too serious—but we’re in a bit of a crucial moment, historically, aren’t we? It’s been quite a year already. How do you see your projects, your work, yourselves responding to the historical moment? Do you feel any artistic obligations? I work in the arts. I’ve seen a variety of attitudes to this question, and I’m wondering how you guys think about that and how you both move forward?
EP: We used to be based in Texas.
KS: We’re both from Florida.
EP: We moved from Florida to Texas, and then we moved from Texas to New York. For me, it’s just trying to stick to having some moral… I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re doing Transsexual Menace in March. We showed that on purpose because everything is bad right now, and that’s a really inspiring, powerful film. For me, it’s just trying to meet the moment and try to do what I can to contribute to the discourse.
KS: Both of us are historians. I think one thing you do when you’re dealing with historical sources, and movies are historical sources, is that you use them for a reason. I think one things we do when we’re doing our intro, even though it’s fun and playful and there’s lots of jokes and banter, is slip in the reason we’re doing this or the shit that we want you to pay attention do without it being like, “Here’s a vegetable.” It’s like, “You’re here. I’m cute. We’re funny. Liz is charming. Two pretty people talking at you, but now, here you go.” I think sometimes people do think this is the first time anything bad has ever happened, especially if you’re young. You learn there’s stuff you can take from the past. Again, with Transsexual Menace, it’s like, this is how people fought back. This is how people made sense of stuff when shit was really dire.
AS: Absolutely. The work of art takes on a life of its own in context and history. Are there any lessons from any particular works or queer cinema in general that you think we can apply to our time today?
EP: Well, I think Transsexual Menace is a really great at the moment because it is about the birth of the trans activist movement of the ‘90s. It is about people. It ends with everyone coming together and learning to organize and protest.
KS: I think why Rosa has always been a genius to us. He’s someone who’s not afraid to be misunderstood in the moment, and then history proves this cat knew what he was talking about, especially in a reaction to bourgeois liberal culture, which is what he was getting up against in the ‘70s. But it’s also that he was never afraid to show everything. I think when you look at Army of Lovers, the other one that we did earlier in the year from him, he’s not afraid to just be like, “Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff in America, and America is really inspiring to me, but it’s also very confusing and weird.” But the whole point of it is to not look at bad times and then go back into the closet, not look at Anita Bryant and then go back into the closet to protect yourself. To not be selfish, to not have hyper-individualism, that the answer. Solidarity is working in community, is working as a force for whatever part of that thing that you’re fighting for.
AS: Out of the closets into the streets or out of the toilets into the streets. Also, please, Anita Bryant’s dead.
KS: I took the biggest shit when I heard that. I was just like, “This one’s for you, Anita.” I love it.
AS: Is there anything else you don’t want to go to the grave with Anita?
KS: I think the thing that I would throw in is if you don’t live in New York and you see somebody who’s doing programming about gay stuff, trans stuff, go there. Because these are probably the people who are probably interested in starting a group or starting something that they can do in their community. That’s where you find people. I would say that you never know until you actually go there and have these conversations before and after. Or honestly, if you’re just looking to get laid, strike up a conversation with whoever goes there, and you can probably get some tail afterwards. If you are smart enough, you can find a scenario where it’s a twofer. It is a win-win case.
AS: The twofer is always best, of course.
EP: I would also say, don’t settle. Always try to fight for better and more. I think a lot of, God bless all independent arthouse cinemas out there and people doing screenings, but I think a lot of queer programming right now is just really stale and boring, and it’s cishet people trying to do the safest thing they can do because they want to get asses in seats without realizing that people will come out for deeper cuts or more controversial work. Try it for the best you can or try for more. Don’t settle for the same old.
KS: I think that’s also the politics of the time. Who else is going to do it? God bless straight people and God bless cis people, but you can’t rely on them to do this for you. Talk to the theater manager, figure something out. Maybe if they’re being assholes, you can just say, “Fuck it. I’ll just feel something from the internet and show it myself.” I would not recommend saying that part out loud, but if you live in a place where it’s just not much, then do it yourself because nobody else is going to do it for you in the way that you need to do it and for your own community the way that you and yours can.
AS: Let’s do it. I’ll see you in those dark corners.