THE TRIP

An LA family with serious boundary issues have their past and future unravel when a dramatic admission causes everyone's secrets to spill out.

In Paris in 1928 American Djuna Barnes writes a farcical novel about the lovers, friends and publishing elite that make up "lesbian Don Juan" Natalie Clifford Barney's sordid salon. Dolly Wilde, Elizabeth Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Mimi Franchetti, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Liane de Pougy, Radclyffe Hall, Mina Loy, Janet Flanner and many more of the finest minds of her time enter her colorful book. Concocted to cheer up Barnes' ailing girlfriend, Thelma Wood, who is sick in the hospital, the story ultimately outlives the romance.

Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler.

Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.

A portrait of poet Eileen Myles as she reads from her novel "Cool For You" and goes about the day in her East Village home.

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.

Queer Genius is a cinematic exploration of four visionary queer artists breaking down barriers in their creative fields as they confront fame, failure, censorship, family, gender, and sexuality. The film embraces the communal possibilities of "genius" from a particularly queer perspective crossing genre and generational perspective. It features intertwined portraits of Eileen Myles, Barbara Hammer, Jibz Cameron, and Black Quantum Futurism.

Queer culture and the arts would be much poorer without the presence and contribution of butch and stud lesbians, whose identity is both its own aesthetic and a defiant repudiation of the male gaze.