Eileen Myles

William S. Burroughs Birthday Bash

Alison Cuddy, Davis Schneiderman

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

Chet Catherine Pancake

Barbara Hammer, Eileen Myles

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.

Community Action Center

A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns

A.K. Burns, Eileen Myles

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.

Masculinity/Femininity

Russell Sheaffer

Barbara Hammer, John Greyson

Masculinity/Femininity is an experimental film project interrogating normative notions of gender, sexuality and performance. Shot primarily on Super 8, the project merges academic and creative critique -- a document of gender de-construction rather than a documentary about gender construction.

I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead

Beatrice Gibson

Beatrice Gibson, CAConrad

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.

All Together Now

Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn

Eileen Myles, Stanya Kahn

Feral tribes are the only inhabitants left in a decimated Los Angeles, sustaining themselves on the debris of an annihilated culture.

THE TRIP

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles

THE TRIP is a road trip movie through the majestic, rough-hewn landscape separating Texas towns Marfa and Alpine with acclaimed poet Eileen Myles as your guide. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s spoken score of Robert Frank’s 1958 poetic classic Pull My Daisy, Myles talks dailiness and political realities with puppet interlocutors Oscar, Bedilia, Montgomery, Casper, and Crocky.

The Renegades

Caroline Berler

Roxane Gay, Lea DeLaria

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.

Eileen

Cecilia Dougherty

Eileen Myles

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.