This month at GAY24 we're looking all the way back to our first public screening and presenting a redux of Season Two, Program One: Gender Outlaws. Back when we started this project it was mostly because we didn't have a loungeroom in our sharehouse and we wanted to watch gay films with our mates; as such, a bunch of people missed out on this program and we still think it's one of our best!

We've tweaked it a bit, appending Ingrid Wilhite's 1984 slapstick silent short Fun With A Sausage; a comedy of errors centred around one gender outlaw's strategically placed kielbasa.

To be an outlaw is to live outside the rules or conventions of mainstream society. This can manifest in a lot of ways; in outright opposition and conflict with that system, or indifference to it. These three films explore what it might mean to be a "gender outlaw" within the context of a colonial western society.

The term, coined by Kate Bornstein in 1994, was quickly taken up by Leslie Feinberg who utilised it in an attempt to describe zir own gender identity. Within "Outlaw", Fineberg explores what it materially meant to exist as a gender outlaw within the context of '90s America, a great deal of which is still extremely relevant today.

"By Hook Or By Crook", made by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard in 2001, offers another approach. The film's two trans-masculine leads live almost completely outside of straight society, barely engaging with or acknowledging it at all. In all but one (extremely pointed) example, the only ways in which they are affected by the mainstream world are institutional. Banks, cops, mental health professionals. It's outright refusal to acknowledge these systems and the power they hold, instead focusing on the power of resourcefulness, friendship, and love, invites the viewer into a world where the queers aren't "just like everybody else", or even "not like everybody else", but just simply are. A radical act of being.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions — Read more — Read less