Rogue Adventures 27

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City's African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion "houses," from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women — including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza.

Guerrino, a prematurely widowed businessman, falls in love with Chantal, a former paratrooper in the German army who changed sex a few years earlier.

A boy, obsessed with comparing himself with those less fortunate, experiences a different life at the home of his aunt and uncle in 1959 Sweden.

When his mother dies, Zino decides to look for his father, Farid. But twenty-five years ago, Farid became Lola.

Sympathetic look at the tragic life of cabaret singer Lorna, who was born a man but really just wants to be a woman. She meets a man who loves her but she can't tell him the truth and decides instead to get an operation so she'll be all woman.

Two drag queens and a transgender woman contract to perform a drag show at a resort in Alice Springs, a town in the remote Australian desert. As they head west from Sydney aboard their lavender bus, Priscilla, the three friends come to the forefront of a comedy of errors, encountering a number of strange characters, as well as incidents of homophobia, whilst widening comfort zones and exploring new horizons.

A grieving husband struggles to come to terms with his wife's passing. Following a night-time visit to her grave, he picks up a transgender sex worker.

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

Wealthy Olga Arbant, with the help of her submissive husband Paul, enjoys kinky scenarios to help with the writing of her novels, as well as controlling everything and everyone. Impoverished Patrizia, who is a virgin, has agreed to do whatever Olga demands for one month. After being subjected to various humiliations, Patrizia frustrates Olga by developing a mind of her own.

Ari can’t satisfy his wife Sara. He crashes his speedboat into a cliff and winds up in Switzerland for rehabilitation in what may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alex, commissioned to paint Sara’s portrait by Ari, becomes Sara’s house guest and sex partner in Ari’s absence. Teresa, Ari’s secretary and ex-lover, is jealous of Sara’s relationship with Alex and schemes to break them up.

At a very camp party in Paris, guests are told about a strange tom-tom played by an Andalusian gipsy, himself a character in a book by a young novelist present at the party. A frantic quest begins for a mysterious love-filter. Tam Tam shows desire and repression through the subversion of archetypes both social (ambassadors, stars, artists) and sexual (homophiles, transvestites, transsexuals), and converting these into a most accurate account of a certain kind of unease: an identity crisis.