For Pride Month, an access services staff member curated a book and film display titled Strength in Diversity: The Queer Lens Past and Present. The books are displayed on the second floor of the library and can be checked out. Accompanying the books are a selection of LGBTQIA+ films that can be streamed through CLIO.
Alongside Strength in Diversity sits our little Pride Spotlight collection - Trans Stories, Trans Histories, Trans Activism. It's been a tough year, and we want to take a moment to celebrate the trans experience.
Streamable films in CLIO
The pseudonymous Agnes was a pioneering transgender woman who participated in an infamous gender health study conducted at UCLA in the 1960s. Her clever use of the study to gain access to gender-affirming healthcare led to her status as a fascinating and celebrated figure in trans history. In this innovative cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt (No Ordinary Man) uses Agnes’s story, along with others unearthed in long-shelved case files, to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed. This collective reclamation breaks down the myth of isolation among transgender history-makers, breathing new life into a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long.
LITTLE GIRL is the moving portrait of 7-year-old Sasha, who has always known that she is a girl. Sasha's family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France. Realized with delicacy and intimacy, Sébastien Lifshitz's documentary poetically explores the emotional challenges, everyday feats, and small moments in Sasha's life.
With searing urgency, WELCOME TO CHECHNYA shadows a group of activists who risk unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ purge raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic.
A proud transgender sex worker since the age of eleven, Luana Muniz, now fifty-nine, shapes a new reality in her "hostel" by housing a new generation of transgender sex workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. QUEEN OF LAPA explores the day-to-day lives, rivalries, and quests for love of sex workers, as Muniz's guides them in a city full of hostility towards its LGBTQ community.
Ned, a bullied outsider, and Conor, a star athlete, are forced to room together at their boarding school. The boys take an instant dislike to each other, and seem destined to remain enemies until an English teacher, Mr. Sherry, begins to drill into them the value of finding one's own voice. This lesson, however, isn't appreciated by everyone, particularly rugby coach Pascal, who has his own agenda and harbors some deep suspicions about the boys' teacher.
Cheryl Dunye's debut feature is as controversial as it is sexy and funny. Cheryl is a twenty-something black lesbian working as a clerk in a video store while struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, an obscure black actress from the 1930's. Cheryl is surprised to discover that Richards (known popularly as "the Watermelon Woman") had a white lesbian lover. At the same time, Cheryl falls in love with a very cute white customer at the video store (Guinevere Turner from Go Fish). Such are the complexities of race and sex in this startlingly fresh debut, which has been attacked by conservative Congressmen for having been funded by the NEA and lavishingly praised in the editorial pages for being charming and courageous.
Filmmaker Agustina Comedi delves into her father Jaime's past. The reconstruction of his intimate life as a father, undress a clandestine past; not only that of a political activist, but also that of a gay man. Before getting married to Agustina's mother, Jaime had been in a relationship with another man for more than 10 years. In Catholic Argentina of the '80s, Jaime's true nature was a family secret. SILENCE IS A FALLING BODY is narrated through Jaime's home videos, which portray a typical medium class family during the boom of neoliberalism in Argentina. This story of political activism and sexual dissidence offers a fascinating insight into life in Argentina between the 1970s and 1990s, peeling back layers of left-wing politics, homosexuality, and AIDS as it shifts between private and public spheres, intertwining the personal and the political. The testimonies of his friends, all of them lesbians, gays, and transexuals, talk about the multiple forms of violence the LGTB community went threw during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, but also about the parties and the emotional alliances that built a new way of resistance. In this exercise of not only individual, but political and collective memory, the film questions the meaning of desire and freedom.
This simmering drama is a New York Times Critics' Pick and an award-winner at Sundance and Berlinale. Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor) works long hours in brutal isolation on his family's farm in the north of England. He numbs the daily frustration of his lonely existence with nightly binge-drinking at the local pub and casual sex. When a handsome Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secareanu) arrives Johnny is confronted with new emotions. An intense relationship forms between the two which could change Johnny's life forever.
A fashion designer who treats her personal assistant like a slave falls in love with a woman who does not love her in return.
A young black man struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.
Marlon Riggs' essay film TONGUES UNTIED gives voice to communities of black gay men, presenting their cultures and perspectives on the world as they confront racism, homophobia, and marginalization. It broke new artistic ground by mixing poetry (by Essex Hemphill and other artists), music, performance and Riggs' autobiographical revelations. The film was embraced by black gay audiences for its authentic representation of style, and culture, as well its fierce response to oppression. It opened up opportunities for dialogue among and across communities. TONGUES UNTIED has been lauded by critics for its vision and its bold aesthetic advances, and vilified by anti-gay forces who used it to condemn government funding of the arts. It was even denounced from the floor of Congress. "Black men loving black men is the revolutionary act" is the rallying cry at the film's end and after more than 20 years, TONGUES UNTIED remains a celebrated vehicle for eloquent self-expression and liberation.
"One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai's emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again. Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong--when the country's LGBTQ community suddenly faced an uncertain future--Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that is by turns devastating and deliriously romantic. Shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and luscious saturated color, HAPPY TOGETHER is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that swoons with the ache and exhilaration of love at its heart-tearing extremes."--Kanopy.
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City's African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion "houses," from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women--including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza--PARIS IS BURNING brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community provider's description.