Queens at Heart is an American short film described as both a documentary and an exploitation film in which four trans women are interviewed about their lives. It was produced in the mid-1960s. The film was digitally preserved in 2009 by the UCLA Film and Television Archive as part of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation. Andrea James and Jenni Olson were among those who worked on its restoration.
Four trans women from New York City are interviewed in what is professed to be part of a six-month psychological project. [1] [2] They are introduced as "contestants in a recent beauty contest". [3] The four of them answer questions about their lives as trans women. They discuss having to present as male during the day at their jobs, undergoing hormone therapy, their dating lives, and their childhood. [4] They also discuss the draft for the Vietnam War. [4] [5] In addition to the interviews, the film contains footage documenting a drag ball. [1] [6]
The four women give their names as Misty, Vicky, Sonja, and Simone. [6] Full names are not used, since the interviewer notes the four of them are breaking a law against cross-dressing. [3] [7] Misty works as a bank teller, Vicky works as a cosmetician, Sonja is a hairdresser, and Simone works on window displays. [8] The interviews are conducted by Jay Martin. [5]
The film was anonymously made, [3] and its production date is also unknown. [1] The Southeastern Pictures Corporation initially released Queens at Heart alongside the 1967 film She-Man . [1] Queens at Heart has subsequently been dated to around 1965 [2] [5] or 1967. [6] [9] [10]
In the mid-1990s, Jenni Olson rediscovered the film after buying a 35 mm reel from a Kansas City projectionist for $75. [6] An ad in the film collecting periodical The Big Reel brought it to her attention. [11] Only a few prints of Queens at Heart existed, [1] and the original negative has been lost. [8] The film was digitally restored from two prints whose color had faded. [9] The restoration was done by the UCLA Film and Television Archive for the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation; it was completed in 2009. [5] [8] The film was the first to be deposited into the project's archive. [12] Funding for the film's restoration was provided by Joanne Herman, as well as the Andrew J. Kuehn, Jr. Foundation and Outfest; Andrea James, Tom Letness, Dick Millais, Jenni Olson, and Kristin Pepe were also involved in the restoration. [13]
The restored film screened at Outfest in 2010. [14] Queens at Heart was screened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2012 alongside two other films about early LGBT life: Mona's Candle Light (1950) and Choosing Children (1984). [9] In 2019, the IFC Center in New York City played it alongside a restored version of the 1968 documentary The Queen . [15] The film also appears on the video streaming platform Kanopy within the United States; [5] it was added to its collection in 2016. [16] Queens at Heart is a bonus feature on Kino Lorber's 2020 Blu-ray for The Queen. [17] [18] The UCLA Film & Television Archive uploaded Queens at Heart to YouTube in 2021. [19]
In the 21st century, it has been variously described as a trans exploitation film, [20] a short documentary film, [10] and an "exploitation documentary short". [12] However, critics have also noted it provides a candid look at the life of some transgender women in the time before the Stonewall riots. J. Hoberman for The New York Times called it "at once an exploitation film and an educational one, with a tone variously prurient, dismissive, and nonjudgemental". [15] Sarah Fonseca for them. called it "a red-blooded American exploitation film that tries to pass itself off as an expert documentary" and criticized the interviewer but also said the four women's participation "has enormous value for those interested in queer and trans life before Stonewall." [5] Olson has described this as "the most important film" that she found. [12] The film is included among the Staff Picks on Kanopy. [4]
A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have usually been gay men, and have been a part of gay culture.
Drag kings have historically been mostly female performance artists who dress in masculine drag and personify male gender stereotypes as part of an individual or group routine. As documented in the 2003 Journal of Homosexuality, in more recent years the world of drag kings has broadened to include performers of all gender expressions. A typical drag show may incorporate dancing, acting, stand-up comedy and singing, either live or lip-synching to pre-recorded tracks. Drag kings often perform as exaggeratedly macho male characters, portray characters such as construction workers and rappers or they will impersonate male celebrities like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Tim McGraw. Drag kings may also perform as personas that do not clearly align with the gender binary. Drag personas that combine both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits are common in modern drag king shows.
Marsha P. Johnson was an American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. Known as an outspoken advocate for gay rights, Johnson was one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
Sylvia Rivera was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist who was also a noted community worker in New York. Rivera, who identified as a drag queen for most of her life and later as a transgender person, participated in demonstrations with the Gay Liberation Front.
Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT website PlanetOut.com. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive, and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history was published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema from Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020, she was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list. In 2021, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. She also campaigned to have a barrier erected on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.
NewFest: The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival put on by The New Festival, Inc., is one of the most comprehensive forums of national and international LGBT film/video in the world.
The Compton's Cafeteria riot occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The riot was a response to the violent and constant police harassment of drag queens and trans people, particularly trans women. The incident was one of the first LGBT-related riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. It marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco.
Outfest is an LGBTQ-oriented nonprofit that produces two film festivals, operates a movie streaming platform, and runs educational services for filmmakers in Los Angeles. Outfest is one of the key partners, alongside the Frameline Film Festival, the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival, and the Inside Out Film and Video Festival, in launching the North American Queer Festival Alliance, an initiative to further publicize and promote LGBT film.
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was a gay, gender non-conforming and transvestite street activist organization founded in 1970 by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, subculturally-famous New York City drag queens of color. STAR was a radical political collective that also provided housing and support to homeless LGBT youth and sex workers in Lower Manhattan. Rivera and Johnson were the "mothers" of the household, and funded the organization largely through sex work. STAR is considered by many to be a groundbreaking organization in the queer liberation movement and a model for other organizations.
World of Wonder Productions is an American production company founded in 1991 by filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey. Based in Los Angeles, California, the company specializes in documentary television and film productions with a key focus on LGBTQ topics. Together, Barbato and Bailey have produced programming through World of Wonder for HBO, Bravo, HGTV, Showtime, BBC, Netflix, MTV and VH1, with credits including the Million Dollar Listing docuseries, RuPaul's Drag Race, and the documentary films The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) and Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016).
Cruel and Unusual is a 2006 American documentary film directed and produced by Janet Baus, Dan Hunt and Reid Williams about the experiences of transgender women in the United States prison system. It was screened on television as Cruel and Unusual: Transgender Women in Prison.
Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video platform for public and academic libraries that offers films, TV shows, educational videos and documentaries. The service is free for users, but content owners and content creators are paid on a pay-per-view model by the institution.
Wu Tsang is a filmmaker, artist and performer based in New York and Berlin, whose work is concerned with hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. In 2018, Tsang received a MacArthur "genius" grant.
Tchindas is a 2015 Spanish-Cape Verdean documentary film directed by Pablo García Pérez de Lara and Marc Serena. The film premiered at the Outfest Los Angeles 2015 where it received a Grand Jury Award.
Happy Birthday, Marsha! is a 2017 fictional short film that imagines the gay and transgender rights pioneers Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in the hours that led up to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. The film stars Mya Taylor as Johnson and Eve Lindley as Rivera.
Silas Howard is an American film and television director, writer, and actor. His first feature film By Hook or by Crook (2001) co-directed with Harry Dodge is a seminal trans masc feature. Howard earned an MFA in directing at UCLA and is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He began directing episodes during the second season of Transparent, making him the show's first trans director.
The Queen is a 1968 American documentary film directed by Frank Simon and narrated by Flawless Sabrina. It depicts the experiences of the drag queens organizing and participating in the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest held at New York City's Town Hall. The film was screened at the International Critics' Week section of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival; however, the festival was ultimately curtailed and ended due to ongoing civil unrest in France before any awards could be given out.
Dykes, Camera, Action! is a 2018 American documentary film about the history of lesbian and queer cinema from the women who made it happen. The documentary is the first feature-length film of New York City based director and editor, Caroline Berler.