Last summer, I threw my own hometown premiere for my short film Bros Before. The film was largely overlooked by the biggest LGBT film festivals and rejected from all the Chicago fests I applied to. When it did get programmed, it was often put into shorts blocks with a bunch of trauma porn and inspo porn about how brave and martyred trans people are — this was offensive to me both discursively and because I felt it decontextualized the artistry of my work.

But getting rejected from all the local film festivals ended up being a blessing in disguise and when Full Spectrum Features reached out to me about putting together an event at Facets as part of an initiative to draw in new audiences, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I decided to program the shorts block of my dreams, something that contextualized my film both aesthetically and thematically. I called it Free Yr Dick, named after a piece of graffiti we see featured towards the end of Bros Before. The event was amazing, we also had a reception with artists, vendors, zines, and a red carpet that I bought for $10 at Party City. And we ended up adding a second screening after the first one sold out.

Fast forward a few months and I get hired by Full Spectrum Features to spearhead an initiative to package and distribute feature-length curated shorts blocks. I’m super excited about this for lots of reasons I’ll save for another, nerdier blog post. But the point is the first thing I did is add my own shit to the catalogue. Side note — I will never claim to be unbiased or neutral in my curation. I am always trying to platform myself, my friends, and my peers making specific, unique, and undervalued film. This is inseparable from my work as an artist.

Anyway, Free Yr Dick is now available on VOD and as a touring program! And I wanted to share the program notes both to get you excited about checking it out but also because this piece of writing has kind of been a cornerstone of my film programming work since I wrote it nearly a year ago. If you see FYD in your city this piece will be part of a very cute zine program I designed 🙂

FREE YR DICK PROGRAM NOTES:

Queer people have been telling our own stories in our own ways since the dawn of the moving image. We may not have been able to openly represent our lives on big-budget productions, but we always found a way — whether by utilizing consumer-grade technology, sneaking a broadcast camera out of our day job at the news station, or embracing the relative freedom of pornography.

Though it would have been impossible for work made under such conditions to look like mainstream media, these limitations gave rise to a unique, rich tradition with its own set of aesthetic conventions. But as the radical gay liberation movement became absorbed into mainstream politics and defanged into the moderate “LGBT rights” movement, so too has the commercial sector started to consume our culture, sanitize it, and sell it back to us. 

The mainstream press circuit seems to concede space for one or two queer films a year and each, for their short stint in the limelight, become fodder for a discourse cycle of moral purity tests about The Gay Representation Movie. Meanwhile, thousands of existing movies by and about queers go completely ignored in this media bonanza, ensuring that most of our cultural output is buried and only the most establishment-friendly versions of our stories are legitimized. 

Challenging, provocative, and exciting queer films are being made every day, whether or not they elicit any thinkpieces. With Free Yr Dick, my goal was to showcase my own film in the context of peers who I feel are taking up the helm of queer underground filmmaking and bringing these traditions into the future. What I came up with is a collection of films that explore so-called deviant sexualities with humor and warmth. These films are bold, raunchy, funny, messy, charming, and a testament to just how sweet perversion can be. 

You can watch Free Yr Dick on VOD here or book the program for a screening in your city here