The brave, fabulous, sexy LGBTQ trailblazers of our past have many valuable and inspiring messages for the queers of today. This eclectic showcase of some of those forebears includes the original long-format trailer for Ed Wood’s problematic yet beloved (“trans canon”) 1953 feature, Glen or Glenda (I Changed My Sex); the 1973 Canadian short, I Am Something Else, an earnest portrait of three trans women just a few years after Stonewall; the rarely seen fifty-year-old sex education film In Winterlight, which portrays a lesbian sexual encounter in a California cabin; the legendary and cathartic 1977 TV news clip in which Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" press conference is zapped by a pie-wielding gay activist (a terrific example of queers countering the virulent homophobes of the Christian Right); amazingly moving Super 8 documentation of the 1978 wedding of gay activist Chuck Bayles (AKA: Flame, Empress XI— part of the Imperial Court) and his partner Vince at San Francisco’s Metropolitan Community Church; a zany performance from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Marjorie Newman’s Altered Habits; and Bill Daughton’s Halloweenie, in which a young gay activist dresses up as a six-foot penis for the annual Greenwich Village Halloween parade. 

The highlight of the program is the remarkable 1967 gem, Queens at Heart, a film that had been essentially lost, with nothing written about it in LGBTQ film literature, until a 35mm print of the film was unearthed in the 1990s (by yours truly) and was subsequently restored by the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. A rare and poignant glimpse into pre-Stonewall queer life, Queens at Heart introduces Misty, Vicky, Sonja and Simone—four courageous trans women who candidly discuss their personal lives with a lurid male interviewer who claims to have spoken to "thousands of homosexuals” (and who clearly doesn’t understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity). The film covers a New York City drag ball and follows the women through their daily lives. They talk about their double-lives—going out as women at night but living as men during the day, and about how they take hormones and dream of "going for a change." One talks about avoiding the draft, another about her fiancé and another about the torment of childhood as an effeminate youth. Their candor and courage are a remarkable gift to the queers of the new millennium. Queens at Heartoffers a vivid and compelling lens on how far we have come as a movement while giving a deep (and wildly entertaining) understanding of what it was like to be transgender at a very different time in history, more than sixty years ago. — Jenni Olson 

Content Warning: I Am Something Else includes graphic surgery footage; In Winterlight includes explicit sex; and Queens at Heart features some rude and obnoxious transphobia.