DYKES, DOLLS, AND QUEERS: A Chat With Elizabeth Purchell

Morgan: I’m here with Liz Purchell - would you like to introduce yourself and tell us what you’re about?

Liz: I’m Elizabeth Purchell; queer film historian and programmer; I do the monthly “Queer Cinema: Lost and Found” series at Austin Film Society; I also created Ask Any Buddy which is a multimedia project exploring the history of the all-male adult film industry and its connections to queer cinema and the spread of gay male visual culture. I’ve done a lot of stuff lately; I’ve been on Blu-rays by the American Genre Film Archive, Altered Innocence, Vinegar Syndrome… I’ve got other programming; just a lot of stuff happening at once.

M: You’re showing a lot of very exciting things… for example, you have an entire program as part of the Ask Any Buddy project showing at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. It’s called “The Golden Age of Adult Male Cinema;” running October 20th through the 25th. 

There’s some really cool stuff in there - you have a restoration of That Boy, a 16 millimeter print of The Night Before, and of course the first screening of your visual project Ask Any Buddy in several years. Would you like to talk about those films and what you’re excited about? What is it that really spoke to you when you picked the films for these programs?

L: This has been a really long time coming. We started working on putting this together in December of 2019, which was probably five or six months after [Ask Any Buddy] premiered at the Contrast Film Festival here in Austin. At the time I thought maybe I could set up some screenings around the country – you know, it’d be fun to do and that’d be the end of it –  so I started setting things up and we started putting together this program for Anthology, and then two things happened. One is that the film started suddenly getting into a whole bunch of film festivals, and B… the world shut down; right before the series was gonna be announced.

So it’s been very strange and interesting picking it back up now. Nearly three years later, after transitioning; after doing a whole bunch of work… it’s interesting, and I'm kind of nervous about it but I'm excited about it at the same time. There have been adult screenings over the past couple of years - the Fred Halsted films, Equation to an Unknown, the French film; Bradford Nordeen from Dirty Looks has done stuff for many many years… but I don’t think there’s ever really been this kind of very concentrated series like this before. I think the thing that’s exciting to me at least is to be able to present so many of these films on 16 millimeter. Without trying to be too fetishisitc about the medium-

M: Oh no, by all means.

L: - this is the first time that some of these prints have been played in decades. There are no good-looking video versions of some of the films; some of these films were never released on video.

M: One of them hasn’t been screened since 2001, and one of them… I believe you got the print off French eBay?

L: Yeah, we’re showing The Night Before in 16 millimeter… the last public announced screening that I could find was a 16 millimeter screening at Anthology back in 2001. Spectacle in Brooklyn, they did some digital screenings I think five or six years ago.

The good thing about this kind of long delay between us originally setting up the series and then the series actually happening is two things: one, at the end of 2020, I got two very very rare prints from French eBay. Good Hot Stuff — which is kind of the gay porn version of That’s Entertainment – which I screened at Light Industry last year. And then while I was at Light Industry last year for that screening, I connected with this film collective there who had bought this huge lot of films from another collector, who had bought them from a shuttered film lab. This collector thought he was just gonna find horror movies and TV shows and things like that, and he was not expecting there to be a large gay porn collection in there.

Good Hot Stuff

M: Always exciting.

L: Yeah. So while I was up there to screen this one film I bought on French eBay, I came back with forty-five or so more… including the famous Sex Demon, the long-lost gay porn riff on The Exorcist. Two of the films we’re showing now are from that lot, 10:30 PM Monday and Head Trip, which are both very obscure films.

The thing with 10:30 PM Monday is that it’s been available on digital thanks to Bijou Video for many years, but their print is missing the first seventeen minutes and the last minute, which is all in black-and-white. So if you wanted to see this film now, the only available version is essentially the middle. You don’t get to see how it starts or how it ends… because it’s a very Wizard of Oz kind of thing; where it starts in black-and-white and goes to color and back to black-and-white. 

M: That sounds fantastic. And you’re helping to restore it with the print you have?

L: No, the film isn’t being restored but there is a scan of it thanks to Vinegar Syndrome. We planned to restore two films just for this series back in 2019, but Covid happened before one of them could be scanned. The one that we were able to get done was Peter Berlin’s That Boy, which is an incredible, iconic, strange, very unusual avant-garde tribute to Peter Berlin. Written, directed, produced, starring, and edited by Peter Berlin. 

To me… I never wanna make things about me. It’s always about the films, and I’m very happy that we could use my film as an excuse to preserve and restore these other films, and to get these other films shown. 

M: A big part of your work as I understand it is finding representation in these movies. When you screened Ask Any Buddy in its early days, you said that “the first gay horror movie was a porno,” and “the first gay romcom was a porno.” You’re showing this film Sex Demon - how do you feel it relates to that idea of representation? 

L: The fun thing with Sex Demon is that the film was advertised as being a comedy. You know, people are kind of trained to look at these films as being bad comedies –  either it’s a bad movie or it’s a parody. So when I've seen this movie with an audience, people go into it thinking it’s gonna be a porn parody… and no, there are funny parts but it’s a serious movie. It gets very, very intense about halfway through and it maintains at an eleven up until the very end. 

It was so cool when we premiered the preservation in LA last October, because for the first half of the movie people were laughing and having fun with it and then just silence. The air got sucked out of the room and it stayed sucked out for the rest of the movie. 

M: You’re doing a double feature at a bathhouse in Florida, correct?

L: It’s two separate screenings. The first one is Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart, which is a giallo that’s set inside the French gay porn industry in the ‘80s.

M: How well do you feel that film reflects ideas of queer desire in these porn films and the industry around them?

L: I feel like Yann Gonzalez is one of the only filmmakers to really “get it right,” you know? He knows the history, he knows the people; he’s very respectful of the films and the filmmakers. I feel like so much of these films - for me at least - is people wanting to see themselves onscreen. The film is kind of about that; it’s been a while since I’ve seen it but there’s a whole thing about how the killer sees themself in a film within a film.

A cool connection to the Ask Any Buddy series at Anthology is that one of the films we’re showing, Head Trip, was directed by this cinematographer François About - who was really the leading cinematographer for any French gay porn film from this era. There’s a character in [Knife + Heart] who’s based on him, played by the director Betrand Mandico, who did After Blue and The Wild Boys. It’s all kind of connected in a weird kind of roundabout way.

M: I love that. It’s something you obviously have a very deep well of knowledge about, and it’s something I was thinking about when watching Ask Any Buddy. Just looking at how that movie operates, how it sort of connects in places. I wouldn’t really call it a “tone piece” –  you start it with a title card that says “Don’t try to understand this; just try to feel it.” It’s… an atmospheric overview of these films; of these emotions and anxieties that were happening at the time as refracted through gay pornography –  and what I'm curious to know is when you sat down to edit the film together, did you have this vision for how it was all interconnected, or did you sit down and take it piece-by-piece and say, “Well, here’s the concept of the gloryhole in the bathroom, and here’s how it connects to [another concept]?” What was the process for you in constructing this movie?

Ask Any Buddy

L: So, the original idea… I had all these ideas; I was supposed to make an hour-long thing for Contrast they were gonna play at an event at a theater. I kept thinking of all these different approaches I could do: like a road trip, where it starts in the West Coast and goes to East Coast; or I could do this or I could do that. If you’re reading any sort of academic writing about these films, you’ll always hear about how they have these “documentary qualities.” “They’re real places, they’re real people, you see how people had sex.” The thing that interests me about the films –  and that I think a lot of people get wrong –  is that even though they have these documentary qualities… they’re fantasy.

M: Exactly.

L: They’re complete fantasy. My idea was: if I have all these hundreds of hours of documentary footage, what would a day look like? So it starts off with a dream sequence, then it goes morning, afternoon, and then night; and then at the end you find out all of what you’ve been watching is a movie-within-a-movie… within a movie. 

M: Within a movie. 

L: Yeah.

M: See yourself on the screen; there you go! I think it’s fantastic. You talked about this a little a minute ago –  obviously it’s been a while; how has your relationship to the film changed in the years since creating it and coming up to screen it again? I’m curious to know how you view the work now versus when you first released it.

L: To be honest, I wasn’t necessarily cognizant of this at the time… but I feel like my interest in this whole genre, and this whole world, was being interested in the films but also learning to perform in a way. I feel like this film is me looking at these films and trying to figure out, “How do you perform as a gay man?” At the time I never went bar cruising, I never had sex in a tea room, I never cruised someone on the subway, or I never did this or I never did that. So it’s kind of looking at these films and seeing “How do you do this?”

M: Even now, post this era of filmmaking, there’s a lot of queer people who see themselves in media like this… see themselves and say “This is how I want to act,” or “This is how I want to live my life.” When you look back on the movies which make up the fabric of Ask Any Buddy, what is it that still stands out to you after all this time?

L: There’s a lot of fucking trans people in this movie! [laughs]

M: Right, right! I remember being struck at the beginning, where there’s that opening dream sequence, there’s the queen who comes down as the Fairy Godmother and wakes him from a dream… and it’s so interesting; seeing this ethereal feminine presence coming into this movie that’s for the most part very masculine, right? You’ve got the double fisting scene –  which is not to say that trans women don’t get fisted; far be it from me to imply that -

L: I don’t wanna get too personal, but maybe fisting… learning how to take a fist -

M: Right.

L: - helped open me up, you know, to my trans identity.

M: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. There’s certainly the feeling in this film of intersections between all these different identities –  when you look at this, and you look at the trans representation in this film –  was that something you were interested in at the time? Or was it a byproduct of you working on these films about queer men and adult cinema?

L: I never could put my finger on why it was, but I was always tangentially interested in trans people in films. I always said it was because i was interested in the history of queer cinema, so it’s like, “Why I am watching I Want What I Want? Why am I watching Let Me Die a Woman? Why am I watching all these obscure trans movies that nobody’s ever heard of?”

M: “Why am I going on Letterboxd and defending Glen or Glenda from all these people talking about it?” That’s my experience.

L: Masterpiece! Masterpiece!

Glen or Glenda

M: It’s so good!! That movie is so good! I really, really love that movie; I used to be somebody who was really into “films considered the worst” or whatever, and I watched [Glen or Glenda] for the first time and realized “This movie’s brilliant; this movie’s fantastic.” You realize how much of film criticism in general is from that space of being a cis white male –  and this is nothing new obviously –  it really warps your perception of what is possible in cinema and what representation looks like on the screen for a lot of people.

L: Lest we forget the original Golden Turkey Awards were created by the Medved brothers, who are notorious right-wing TV puppets.

M: Well, representation in mainstream cinema’s come a long way; we had the first gay movie come out this month with the release of Bros. Everybody’s talking about it.

How do you feel when something like that comes up? It’s a recurring problem in queer history - there’s this recent article; I can’t remember the author, but it’s about being “the first trans woman;” being “the first queer movie” and that sort of thing. Do you find that as a historian, as an archivist, that these are frustrating declarations, or do you turn inwards and say “Well, I have to continue working on my job to give people knowledge and learning about these films?”

L: It’s both of those. It’s very frustrating because A., it’s ahistorical; B., why does this necessarily matter? You’ll never really know if it’s the first movie by a trans woman, if it’s the first movie by an indigenous person, or this or that or that. I think really – and I don’t know if this is me shutting myself out of future career opportunities –  I think it’s a real failing of repertory cinema, home video; film restorers and distributors. They normally look at these queer films as kind of an afterthought. We get one movie a year from Criterion, and we get one movie a year from Kino; we get this, we get that. With these huge gaps in access and knowledge… people just don’t know this stuff exists.

M: It’s always the “special interest.”

L: There are of course amazing people doing queer repertory programming all over the world. A lot of it is so frustrating to me, because it’s still stuck in “We’re only getting to show one movie a month, so we’re gonna show The Watermelon Woman and we’re gonna show Parting Glances and we’re gonna show Paris is Burning and we’re gonna show this or that,” instead of diving into the muck and seeing what else there is.

There’s this big touring program that UCLA put together which is “Pioneers of Queer Cinema”... which you know, great concept; a lot of really great rare films in there, but it is kind of anchored around Paris is Burning, The Watermelon Woman, Parting Glances, Word is Out; the same old movies. I’m one of those people; I always wanna see more. I wanna see what else there is. With the series I do at AFS, it’s one of my guiding principles.

M: Absolutely. I saw your screening of Kamikaze Hearts... the movies you show are always very interesting films. Do you find that your programming ethos for [Austin Film Society] is going out of your way to show things people haven’t seen before, or do you look for whatever catches your interest, or is there a specific guiding purpose behind what you choose for these screenings?

L: I always want it to be accessible. I never want to be completely up my own ass; just showing stuff for myself. But at the same time I do want it to be challenging to people, and AFS has been really cool with what I’ve been doing, and allowing me to show whatever I want basically. And allowing me to show short films with features, which is to me a big deal. There aren't any venues in Austin that are built for 16 millimeter, and the idea of just doing a shorts program isn't the most commercial thing. So if I can show a movie that’s more well-known or more accessible like Parting Glances, and then show an experimental video about AIDS before it… that to me is good programming, because you’re using a big name and using it to expose people to more radical or more interesting art.

M: I think that’s really valuable. I just remembered I saw your screening of Pink Narcissus... I did not expect there to be a real-life cumshot on the screen, which, you know; not unwelcome but very surprising.

L: Come to New York and you’ll see a whole lot of cumshots! [laughs]

M: I truly wish I could! The programming you have lined up is incredible; I’m really interested in this sphere and it’s very hard to find other people who are doing this kind of work. Do you ever have trouble accumulating resources for these projects, or do you find there are always other people who are interested in sharing these films? Obviously there are because you’re finding screening spaces, but what are some challenges you run into when collecting and screening these movies?

L: I think financial is the biggest one. I’ve never had a grant; never had a fellowship or internship or this or that. So everything I do is basically self-financed, which has left me in… not the best financial state, but at the same time people have been extremely gracious with their time and doing things because they believe in what we’re doing. Reuben from Vinegar Syndrome has been incredibly kind in scanning dozens and dozens of these films that he owns prints of or that I own prints of just to make sure they’re preserved. I mean the fact that he went through the trouble of restoring a film just so we could show it in the series is incredible. 

I think too it’s also just trying to prove to venues that there is interest in these films. I feel like this type of programming should be happening year-round, and not just once a month or relegated to just June. I have this really sincere belief that queer people just love movies, and they wanna see queer movies, and if you show queer movies people for the most part will come out.

M: Right! We screened But I’m A Cheerleader a few weeks ago and people turned up for that. 

Are there any other projects you’re working on at the moment? Do you ever see yourself sitting down at the editing table again and putting another video project together, or are you mostly going to focus on historian and programming work for the time being?

L: There is this long-in-the-works trailer compilation mixtape project that I’ve been working on for a couple years since Covid started, so I need to finally finish. To be honest I’m in the middle of a very loud job search –  I’d love to have a job in film; I’d love to be part of a team for once, working on… if not these films, then films I believe in. That’s really the big stuff. I’m trying to break out of the gay porn rabbit hole. 

M: You’ve recently recorded commentary on [AGFA’s] Doris Wishman box set with Indecent Desires; what was that experience like?

L: The thing with me and commentaries is I really enjoy doing them; I like doing them… they are so hard. Especially if you’re doing it by yourself because you’re literally having to talk for seventy, eighty, ninety minutes. I’m not one of those kinds of people who can just put on the movie and talk; it has to be very researched, it has to be very organized. That one was hard because there’s not a whole lot of hard information to be found about that specific film. So I was able to use it as a jumping-off point to talk about queerness in Doris Wishman’s films; how all of her movies are gay in one way or another. That film in particular is very trans; I think it’s a film about dysphoria. So I was able to talk about that, and people have seemed to like it.

Indecent Desires

M: I’ve only seen a handful of Doris Wishman’s films… I saw Night to Dismember, which is not something I can hold in my brain very easily, you know? But I’ve also seen Bad Girls Go To Hell and that’s Gender Envy: The Movie to me. All the women in that movie… oh my god. The part where she walks in the apartment and the girl is laying back on the sofa with her giant hairdo; it’s transcendental. Is Indecent Desires your favorite Wishman movie, or do you have others you really like as well?

L: It’s hard because there’s so many. Indecent Desires was never one of my favorites necessarily when I agreed to do the commentary, but it’s really grown on me because it’s such a strange, unsettling film. My favorites are Bad Girls Go To Hell, the Chesty Morgan films… I really like Let Me Die A Woman, which is, you know, shock-horror. I love her later films like Dildo Heaven, which I think is a masterpiece of thrifty “do-it-yourself” filmmaking and mixing of formats and making something new out of something old.

M: I mean that’s what queer cinema is all about, right? It’s the DIY.

L: Yeah.

M: What do you think the future of queer representation in porn looks at this point? I think you see a lot of community building up around personalities like Carta Monir who are doing more of this very public, very interesting work on queer sexuality. Do you think that kind of work folds back into this same sort of representation we talk about with the Ask Any Buddy project – or do you think something has fundamentally changed in terms of accessibility and the way porn is consumed, and has shifted the way we engage with that representation?

L: This is outside what I kind of do, but… people like Carta do amazing work. I think it’s incredible there are all these avenues for trans people and marginalized people to get into sex work on their own terms, and make a life out of it, and make art out of it. I think things are very different than they were in the films in the ‘70s and the ‘80s because you can watch porn wherever; you can look it up for free – you can pay for it; you should pay for it. But it’s not like you have to go to a theater, you have to pay five bucks, you have to make a feature-length film, or do all this other stuff. From the perspective of a person making porn, the barrier to entry is much much lower. And I think that’s different. 

I always approach these films from a cinematic perspective and not a porn perspective. So that question is kind of outside of what I’d normally do… that was a long, rambly confusing answer -

M: No, no; absolutely. It’s something I’ve been chewing on a lot recently; in terms of how the internet is starting to be more corralled and dictated in particular ways. I think one thing that Ask Any Buddy really reveals – or really stresses for someone who isn’t aware of it – is how subversive these films are, and how underground gay male sexuality feels in these movies. It was a much riskier prospect… and I think it’s interesting to chart how that has changed and how porn has shifted in that way. 

I’m really glad to see that [your film] is getting screened again for people, because it’s such an interesting combination of historical document and gay fantasia. A couple other things that I wanted to pick your brain about: the Sex Demon screening, that’s screening in Florida and Leeds and I believe a few other places?

L: Miami, Leeds, Glasgow, and Chicago. We’ve already done screenings in LA, New York, Philly, Seattle, and some other places.

M: I could ask you about [Lucio] Fulci. I watched City of the Living Dead while I was preparing for this interview; are you a Fulci fan at all?

L: I am, actually. Have you ever seen New York Ripper?

M: I haven’t; no. [laughs]

L: I love that movie so much! That is a movie that men think is an awful movie because it's misogynistic but every woman I know… [laughs]

M: Is in love with it? [Liz nods] That’s fantastic. I’ve been watching his movies; The Beyond… you know, the classics; the heavy hitters. I really like how his films have this heightened sense of reality to them.

If you were to step out and show other films aside from the queer cinema programs, what would you want to put on the screen?

L: I’m very interested in sex cinema in general. I’d love to show more sexploitation films; I’d love to show heterosexual adult films. I’d love to show horror films… I would love to just do programming in general. [laughs] You know, the porn stuff is fun, the queer stuff is a lot of fun; but I just wanna be able to show people things of all types.

M: Is there anything else you wanna go over as we wrap this up?

Vampyros Lesbos

L: If you’re in Austin you can come see Vampyros Lesbos later this month at AFS. I will not be in town for that sadly, but I am very excited about the screening because I feel like Jesús Franco is a filmmaker who is very associated with Austin, and Austin’s film scene. I know he received a lifetime achievement award at Fantastic Fest; somewhere in the 2000s. They flew him out, and they flew his wife Lina Romay out. But the five years I’ve been here, none of his films have screened anywhere. I think he kinda got swept up in the whole “Me Too” thing, even though… he’s a pervert, but he’s not a bad pervert; if that makes any sense. 

So I’ve been wanting to see his films in theaters for many many years, and Vampyros Lesbos is an incredible, avant-garde erotic horror masterpiece. We’re pairing that with a short film by the great gay filmmaker Curtis Harrington, which is a portrait of the amazing, beguiling occultist Marjorie Cameron called The Wormwood Star. It’ll be a great program, and I’m sad I have to miss it and I really hope people turn out. I was very nervous about showing Jesús Franco because I didn’t want it to just be middle-aged straight dudes. I want the dykes, I want the dolls; I want all the cool queer people to come out and see this movie and have it not just be… Gen X’ers.

M: Well there you have it folks. The dykes, the dolls, and the queers are gonna be out for Vampyros Lesbos; so I’ll see you all there.

What’s your next AFS programming? What are you doing after October?

L: It’s not live yet, but in November we’re showing Rosa von Praunheim’s Transexual Menace, which is one of my favorite trans docs. Very rare. Then December… I was gonna show Parting Glances, but we lost it at the last second so we’re showing Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street. So, two trans-related films and two-trans related shorts to go with it; it’s a very trans calendar.

M: As it should be. ◆

Liz Purchell is an Austin-based queer film historian and programmer. You can learn more about her work at https://www.elizabethpurchell.com/.

Morgan Hyde is a writer, programmer, and podcaster. You can find her on all your favorite social websites @cursegoat.