By Juniper July 2, 2024
Friendly Reminders:
- Remember to fill out the interaction spreadsheet, yes even if they’re asking where the bathroom is
- Please put out the word we’ll need to up our volunteer numbers when we move and the sooner we get on that the better so maybe put in a word for us with any of your friends who love gay books
- As usual please avail yourself of the tea and snacks
- It’s summertime and time for summer reading maybe pick something out of our collection you’ve never heard of or something you’ve been meaning to read, soak up the sun and read some gay books!
What’s NOOTS?
- We will be holding our second open meeting on Zoom at 5:30 pm on July 9th. This meeting will be open to all volunteers so please please come if you are able and bring your questions, your concerns, your suggestions or just your listening ears we want to hear from you and we want you to be involved in the decisions we make for the future of OOTS. We’re going to be discussing forming some planning committees for some exciting new projects as we prepare for the move and look towards the future of OOTS getting as many of us involved as possible is vital to making sure OOTS sticks around for as long as possible!
- Please sign up for tabling at Pride events if you are able we have a couple more to go in July and August before the season is over and we need people at our tables don’t make Kira do them all alone!
- Professor Julia Bullard has been awarded an SSHRC Partnership Development Grant for her “Developing a community for community-centered vocabulary work,” project alongside our very own Bri Watson! OOTS will be benefiting from some of the grant money along with some of our fellow specialized Vancouver libraries
- We’re going to be upping our recruitment in the next couple of months with some posters and events let us know some good places to advertise if you have ideas
Queer Creator Spotlight: Jane Shoenbrun
I’m highlighting Jane today in honor of their most recent film I Saw the TV Glow which just came out in theaters. Shoenbrun was born in 1987 the same year that such queer classics The Lost Boys, Hellraiser, and, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 among others (seriously 1987 was one of the best years for horror) hit the screens. They grew up Jewish in Ardsley New York and worked for some time at a movie theater. In 2018 they made their film debut with A Self-Induced Hallucination, a documentary covering the infamous history of the Slenderman, a creepy character invented online that would go on to inspire games, movies, folklore, and a devastating real-life crime. Because the film is compiled of footage from various YouTube videos on the topic Shoenbrun has stated that they do not wish to profit from it.
Their interest in digital folklore would continue with their first fiction film We Are All Going to the World’s Fair in 2021. The film is a digital folk horror filmed in the style of screenlife film. Screenlife films are told entirely from a device screen, usually a laptop or phone. It’s taken off recently with films like Spree (2020), Host (2020) and Dashcam (2021). The film follows Casey (Anna Cobb), a teenager taking part in the ‘Worlds Fair Challenge’ an online challenge that seems to transform its participants into something new. The film is incredibly uncanny and strange but incredibly compelling as you wonder alongside Casey and their fellow players what is real and what is just part of the game. Shoenbrun has described this film as a metaphoric depiction of the feeling of dysphoria. The way that queer folks tend to dive into obscure internet cultures as an escape from a feeling they don’t have a name for yet. In an interview, Shoenbrun said of the internet in their film “It’s a space where you can exist without a physical form and without a body, so it’s obviously enticing if you’re not in the right body and trying to sort of escape yourself or create a new identity outside of the restrictions of physical form in the real world.” During the process of writing this film, Shoenbrun realized that they were trans while on a magic mushrooms trip in 2019. They identify as transfeminine, nonbinary, polyamorous, and anti-capitalist. They have gone on record saying that they don’t completely understand their relationship to their gender. I’ll link the rest of the interview below it’s really interesting. The film is also a really interesting look into internet subcultures and the way that folklore is collaboratively created online. I could get into the weeds on the Gutenberg’s Parenthesis theory of it all but then we’d be here all night.
Their second film I Saw the TV Glow just came out this year. While I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while this is the film that made me so desperate to talk about them this month. The movie is about Owen (Justice Smith) and his best friend Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and their favorite show The Pink Opaque. For Owen and Maddy, it’s more than just a show, its an escape. As the film goes on however the lines between reality and The Pink Opaque begin to blur and Owen must make a terrifying choice. The film is at the same time a love letter to the monster of the week shows of the 90s and their fandoms and a gut-wrenching meditation on the consequences of self-repression. The movie is profoundly creepy, the real horror is the pain of going through life denying who you are. I found it incredibly meaningful on a personal level as I’m sure many have being a queer nerd who was very repressed and found that nameless feeling of safety and validation in fiction (ngl y’all this one broke me a little). They have said that for them the film and its ending (which I will not spoil go see it) is about “the process of un-repressing and getting to the beginning of what we classically think of as transition, to me, it’s like, that’s a hero’s journey! Even if it doesn’t look like the classic idea of the hero’s journey. It was really important to me to not sugarcoat that, and to not pretend that after that catharsis and awakening, which is both the end of something and the beginning of something, that everything is okay, and things are happy now, and all of the trauma from a life in which you’ve been told from the youngest age that your true self is an imposter and you need to apologize for it, that that doesn’t go away the next day.” (I’ll also link this interview below it’s good stuff).
Their next film will be a slasher titled Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma which will follow a queer director shooting the next film in a fictional horror franchise (I’m so excited for this you have no friggin idea!). They are also working on a trilogy of novels titled Public Access Afterworld which they have said will be the conclusion of the work they began with their first two films. According to them, it will be their “Dune” with a scope much larger than 90 minutes with a cast of characters, and lore that will span centuries and alternate universes. I’ll be first in line at the pre-order.
Trans themes and characters in horror are nothing new. Trans folks have long read themselves into horror films that delve into our relationship to our bodies be it body horror, werewolf movies or the strange detachment of surreal horror. Trans characters and stories however do not have a great history in the genre, particularly in the transfem killer trope (I love you Psycho, I love you Sleepaway Camp but what the actual fuck!). Trans characters in horror have historically been relegated to monsters or jokes. Shoenbrun is part of a movement to create trans horror from a trans perspective. One reason I find their films so interesting and so relatable is that they are less focused on concrete trans stories but on the feeling of being trans before you know the words for that disconnect with yourself. They have listed both David Cronenberg (epic trans ally) and David Lynch as influences on their work. They have stated that their work exists in response to “the classical languages of trans cinema — or “trans cinema,” which again was made mostly by cis people.” They believe that these movies often “oversimplify” the trans experience and that for them it manifests itself as far more “internal and intangible.” As a result, though their films are not as explicitly trans in a basic sense they feel more trans than just about anything I’ve ever seen and depict a period in the trans experience that doesn’t get as much attention as it should. Namely, the time before you understand the meaning of that niggling discomfort at the back of your mind. In short, go watch their movies they’ll gut you but it’s worth it, so worth it. Beyond this, they just have a fantastic eye for the grotesque and uncanny in film, and their films are just gorgeous to look at. I’m excited to see what they and other trans filmmakers like them do in the future and I’m so glad that the eggs of 2024 can go see this movie!
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/jane-schoenbrun-were-all-going-to-the-worlds-fair-1235220775
https://aframe-stg.oscars.org/news/post/jane-schoenbrun-i-saw-the-tv-glow-interview
The Gay Agenda:
- Burnaby Pride July 20th
- Chilliwack Pride July 21st
- Richmond Pride July 27th (PLEASE SIGN UP TO VOLUNTEER! As of now this one is completely unstaffed)
- Happy official Queer Wrath Month everyone!
- Nonbinary Awareness Week starts July 8th so be aware
- July 11th celebrates International Nonbinary Day and Lesbian Aunt’s Day
- Day of Non-Monogamy Visibility July 15th
- Canadian Marriage Equality Day July 20th
- Polysexual and Polyromantic Visibility Day July 26th
- Head on down to Stanley Park for the Pride Run and Walk on July 28th first 500 registrants register free! https://vancouverpriderun.ca/
- Vancouver Pride Art Show beginning July 22nd and going til August 2nd at Bean Hastings
Queer Story Recommendation
In conversation with the modern trans fiction of Jane Shoenbrun, I’d like to highlight a piece of trans literature from the past to show that it’s not all transfem killers and jokes that have aged poorly. It’s finally time to talk about Ursula K. Le Guin. Her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969 (noice) and is still revered today as a fascinating entry in the canon of nonbinary literature. The book is part of her Hainish Cycle a series of self-contained science fiction stories set in the same universe on various planets. The series began in 1964 with a short story titled “The Dowry of Angyar.” Another notable entry in this series is The Dispossessed (1974) a staple of anarchist science fiction with some queer characters in its own right go check it out! The novel follows Genly Ai, a human of Terra (essentially Hainish Earth) as he embarks on a mission to convince the people of Gethen to join the Ekumen confederation of planets. The novel follows his difficulties understanding the culture of Gethen given that its people are ambisexual without binary gender, swapping sexual dimorphism at the time of mating to suit their needs as well as his growing relationship with Estraven, a Prime Minister of Gethen whom Ai initially mistrusts.
Like many of Le Guin’s books particularly within The Hainish Cycle, this novel explores gender dynamics, culture shock, and the process of finding consensus and understanding within difference. The novel was originally conceived as a thought experiment but has since come to mean a great deal to trans and nonbinary folks who see themselves in the characters and the society she created on Gethen. Despite the fact everyone on Gethen is what we today would call nonbinary as gender doesn’t play at all into their personal identities Le Guin uses he/him pronouns to describe most of the characters in the novel. When discussing this we must remember that the book was published in 1969 before the wave of trans visibility we see today and the prominence of pronoun discourse in the public zeitgeist. She has since spoken regretfully about this choice and within the book, it can be read as an expression of Genly’s confusion and inability to properly describe a culture he is confused by. All of this is not to excuse it but to explain its presence. Personally doesn’t bother me too much as the depiction is overall pretty good. Genly is initially thrown off by this culture he is not familiar with but they themselves are not dehumanized and this initial prejudice is thrown into question and framed as small-minded. In any case, whether or not this book stands up to 2024 standards of nonbinary representation discourse it is incredibly cool to see a sincere exploration of nonbinary identity and societal structure in the late 60s and we love Ursula K Le Guin so if you haven’t read anything of hers yet this might be a good place to start. If you somehow haven’t been radicalized yet she’ll take care of that I promise.
