Trans and Gender-nonconforming Filmmakers Exhibit at Fountain Street Gallery

Trans and Gender-nonconforming Filmmakers Exhibit at Fountain Street Gallery
by Frankie Symonds
This is an excerpt from the original article.

Take controversies, firings, an early retirement, and a couple of untimely deaths, add a global pandemic, mix it all up, and the experimental film scene in Boston, like the old gray mare, ain’t what she used to be. While it’s true that Boston was an important city for experimental cinema for decades, it’s also true that when things fall apart, it’s usually not for nothing. The influence of the figures at the center of the now defunct scene was far reaching, but older white men, even gay ones, aren’t always the best gauges of environmental toxicity, to put it lightly. The grandiose heroics and self-mythology that defined the American avant-garde cinema of the second half of the 20th century, like more mainstream cultural phenomena, are actively being reconsidered. In Boston, younger queer and gender-nonconforming filmmakers are employing the tactile nature of celluloid to accommodate their artistic needs.

Queer people have been some of the most important filmmakers of the avant-garde since the 1930’s, but it is only fairly recently that trans and gender-nonconforming artists have stepped out of the margins of an already very marginalized artistic practice. With the exception of Jean Cocteau’s championing of Kenneth Anger’s first film Fireworks, queer filmmakers works were seen and supported by straight-led scenes. Queers were accepted, or tolerated, sometimes celebrated(with more wonder than respect) by their straight colleagues, which is often what led to them being considered part of cinema history. It is when marginalized people begin keeping their own gates that truly robust creative output can happen, which is obviously difficult to achieve when those people’s very existence is illegal.

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