Framing Agnes | Chase Joynt, Zackary Drucker, Kristen Schilt

so I joined the film and television archive a little over a year ago but that one year really represent represents over 200 years of experience amongst the amazing staff that I work with it is humbling to be surrounded by so much experience and excellence and one of the things I've admired of the team when joining UCLA was a deep commitment to collaboration it is something I've sought more of in our screenings our preservation work and projects and tonight I'm proud to say we have an amazing set of Partners so I want to acknowledge all of them here tonight presenting this evening with us our outfest the brew and Film Society and UCLA Library special collections I want to also special thank our special Community Partners the UCLA LGBT campus resource center UCLA School of theater film and television UCLA Department of Sociology UCLA transgender Pride or sorry transgender UCLA Pride the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law UCLA study a center for the study of women and our media partner outright news magazine and you can grab one of those on your way out tonight as well big round of applause for all our partners please when the film and television archive joined the UCLA Library just in October 2019 we became more closely aligned with the UCLA library's world-class archival and research collections UCLA Library special collections is where some of the papers of Harold garfinkel are accessible questions around garfinkel's research and archives are essential to this film and you'll see it tonight so tonight as partners on tonight's event and I'm tomorrow's conversation which I'll share more about later we're joined by my colleague in library special collections to talk about the great work that they do jet Jacobs is the head of Public Services Outreach and Community engagement for UCLA Library special collections please join me in Walking welcoming her to the stage [Applause] hello so libraries the oh let's start that again my first public speaking event in like three years um Library special collections at UCLA stewards and makes available the distinctive materials that facilitate original research and critical inquiry we do this by encouraging their use in our publicly available reading room within the Charles D young research Library as well as collaborating with undergraduate and graduate courses to embed exploration and primary source literacy into curriculum across disciplines we do this with the knowledge that many past Collections and descriptive practices have historically privileged and upheld existing power structures often to the detriment of numerous individuals and communities though we do not hold the specific materials that were consulted for this film we do hold selected papers from garfinkel and other researchers that were involved in UCLA's gender clinic and these collections do reflect the motives and the biases of those individuals the promise of original research using primary resources is at its best an opportunity to interrogate and question and potentially disrupt these biases and in doing so uncover the often the voices of the experienced sorry the voices and the experiences that have been neglected excluded and often outright suppressed from written history it's also an opportunity to discuss the ethical and privacy related concerns surrounding past research as well as those current approaches um to analyze these materials and the stories that they contain through a modern lens if you'd like to be part of this conversation which I really hope you would like to be I invite you invite you to join us for a discussion with director writer and producer Chase joint along with Christian shilt and Vanessa worry at the Charles young research Library tomorrow evening so the speakers will be leading a dialogue on transgender two-spirit gender expansive and intersex representation the history of TGI related research at UCLA and current organizing efforts for ethical informed Community Driven and justice-centered research around TGI people light Refreshments will be served at 6 pm and the discussion will begin at seven and we hope to see you there thank you foreign did you dye your hair for the screening so you can match everything here it's really good um thank you so much jet for joining us um and now a little bit of why we're here today so um when I saw framing Agnes online at Sundance this year I knew quickly that the film needed to come to UCLA and you'll see why actually one of our programmers KJ Ralph Miller and I was I was telling somebody I was actually emailing her saying you have to watch the film while I was watching it so I'm really excited to bring it here rooted deep in painful deep and painful and unethical histories that took place on campus framing Agnes gives space for the questions and provocations that make archival work and creative work so interesting and crucial I was drawn to the way that this hybrid film brought to life the complexities of identity and ethical issues in archive and research that are still unfortunately relevant today there are layers of questions and ideas posed by the film so sharp in its inquiries and Brilliant in crafting multiple views through documentary and narrative storytelling I look forward to peeling this apart more in the conversation with you all after the screening despite the complicated histories revealed in the film I can say that UCLA is proud to be ranked nationally as a top lgbtq and trans-friendly campus now one of the ways our campus is continuing to improve experiences of transgender non-binary intersex and gender non-conforming community members is the appointment of a new implementation committee the UCLA gender recognition implementation committee's charge is to ensure our campus updates our policies Data Systems facilities and practices to better support community members of all genders the UCLA lgbtq campus Resource Center one of our partners for this program is also a strong leader in resource for the advocacy and inclusion of trans and non-binary Bruins you can learn more about our campuses efforts at lgbtq.ucla.edu we are joined tonight with some fantastic guests for the film unfortunately however Jules Gill Peterson has laryngitis and is unable to join us she's very sad that she couldn't be here and sends her regards but you'll hear her fantastic perspectives and voice in the film framing Agnes is a remarkable breathing document one that interacts with audiences and archives in ways that I hope will make for an interesting conversation following the screening we're thrilled that participant Zachary Drucker and Christian Schult and director writer and producer Chase joint will join us in a q a session but before we begin and before the film starts very shortly please join me in welcoming Chase to the sage to share some remarks about the film thank you hello thank you so much for being here thanks May and KJ and Jet uh our whole team was standing in the lobby while the queue was extending outside speaking at length about how queer it looked and how happy we were uh no offense to the non-queer looking people in the room uh we are so so thrilled to be here uh our team is stacked with Bruins as I was sitting listening to the remarks I was thinking about how many different versions of things I came out as on campus over the many years and we're really grateful for the opportunity to continue these conversations in this specific space my collaborator and dear friend Kristen Schultz the sociological research anchor of our project was in the lobby and looked at me and said the ethnomethodologists are here and I was like never have the ethnomethodologists heard this in a theater before breaking some boundaries um you know but in all seriousness uh it's uh fiction and a misnomer to summarize this project as a solo authored or directed Pursuit it is a deeply and enduringly collaborative project and I'm joined here in the house by some of the key project collaborators Brook siebold editor and co-producer stand up Brooke if you can Becky Gebhart fellow Brewing composer Kristen schild sociologist research anchor Zachary Drucker star and participant Samantha Curley producer extraordinaire we have Lex taking pictures we have miles our impact producer in the house I believe and perhaps others who have arrived who I don't have on my radar and I'm gonna have to make up for as soon as the screening is over thanks for being here we'll see on the other side Zachary Drucker independent artist filmmaker and cultural producer Chase joint director writer producer Christian Shield associate professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago that was my introduction for y'all um thank you so much for for joining us and and like for this tremendous project it's it's been years in the making and so kind of the first question kind of an obvious one but one that I think the audience would love to hear about is kind of how this project came to being and how you all the three of you part of also the short and obviously now the future like how did this all come about so I'd love to hear that if we're gonna go way back we're starting with you um so Jason and I uh we always like to say since we're at UCLA we met um in the first class at ever T8 as a graduate student Chase was an undergrad in that class and we've been BFFs ever since but if we wanted to further disclose we would say that we were the two very obviously queer looking people in a room full of seemingly not queer looking people it's like I set it up at the beginning here we are delivering and we recognize each other across the room and thought like perhaps we should know each other as a way to navigate this place yeah but about this project it started in 2013 we received a melon fellowship at the University of Chicago that um was very very rare Fellowship from the gray Center that um supported an artist to come work for a year in collaboration with an academic and so Chase came and worked with me and the only requirement was that you had to teach a class together and we taught a class one of our students is here today shout out to you Ellen um and from that we started working on um we were looking at the question of how do you tell a story uh through documentary film and also through social science research and what does it mean to talk about the truth and through that we started looking at the Agnes case which to me is a sociologist is an example of this because um it's been written about probably 50 times and different readings of this case and so in academic writing and in blogs and so we were interested in how the story had kind of changed over time and then we decided to try to do some archival research and then after we found the Case Files it was striking to notice the relationship between the questions that researchers were asking trans people and the questions that were being asked on talk show stages writ large and so we thought what happens if we pay close attention to those questions and what if we start collapsing these contexts and thinking about more creative ways to engage the material and so we made some calls to some of our favorite people to ask them to walk toward a project in formation and we made a short version of the film that premiered in 2019 and and really started developing the the feature with a little bit more time and a little bit more money and an extraordinary team of collaborators with whom it would not have been possible that's so great and Zachary can you share how you became part of the project as well I you know I just would love to Express gratitude for all of you being here and for this convening and it was such a disappointment and I'll take it to go to Sundance IRL and to see it and and just being in this theater in particular on this particular night with these particular people it's a gift I love this theater um I feel like we are surrounded by Spirits by the spirits of our ancestors by potentially our descendants by legendary Queens like Billy Wilder and then yeah and Brilliant and the many queens that have graced the stage I think of my Aunt Holly Woodlawn and Flawless Sabrina I think of the recently deceased woman who was wearing this Blazer and which I got from an estate sale um I'm also in gratitude for we're going we're going far back yeah being able to drive a 1950s Thunderbird all the waves like to Santa Monica and back um but at the point I wanted to make is that like we're in a room full of people and we bring so much of uh ourselves to our understanding of these ephemeral um spirits that we have lost I wonder Did Agnes know that she was Agnes did she know how Infamous uh her position in this history would be um I think about all of the Legends whose names we know and the ones uh whose names we don't know all of these subjects you know we don't know their names but by speaking their words we are resurrecting them and um embodying them in a corporeal way it's such an incredible thing exercise thing of um lost histories and it's such an incredible Confluence of I think pedagogical approaches to understanding history and and art and uh inhabiting you know spirits one of the things that I was really moved by was something that Jules mentioned that her professor had sort of talked to her about was our job is not to act as if we know as if we know about people something that they don't know about themselves right and as an archivist um and you know obviously in our groups of moving images but I think a lot about sort of the creative role that the significance of of what somebody like you and this collaborative team that you've put together really are trying to do which is in some way Channel and embody something about representation but leaving without feeling like I know these people fully right and that's like the tension that you have in this film that's so interesting to me I would love if you could talk a little bit about some of that in in terms of how how you've all kind of engaged in that because you flow between these like in and out of like reality and not and what is you know reality right so that's something that the film does really well I think and and the choices you made to get there all of you you know would be something I'd love to hear more about yeah I mean this is where collaboration becomes foundational because I think people are obsessed with you know is it verbatim is it every word and my challenge back is always well is it verbatim when it's interpreted through the body and mouth and experiences and affects of a performer of someone who is walking alongside a history with their own understanding of why they're there and what they're doing and I think that you know I always return to this amazing moment in prep with Angelica where went over to her house and was talking about Georgia and talking about the research and she stopped and was just like I don't need this like I know who she is because I can feel her you know on my skin and I could feel her in my body and I think that that's such a striking intervention into our obsession with this kind of archival recovery as if we're going to find something what do we imagine we're going to find when we get there and so what happens if we shift the terms a little bit and think about this not as a kind of casting process or an experiment in performance but something else right like a really trans investment in finding a third thing that is beyond a kind of Truth Versus false or performance versus reality binary it's also I think an incredible locating of oneself in a history that is just like slipping through your fingers and barely reaching the screen and this project isn't in and of itself was such an incredible labor of love with obstacles and the pandemic there was Hellfire it was hell in high water [Laughter] um um and I think that it is a incredible Discovery to think about the the stories that we will that are ahead of us the stories that we've yet to find um so much of our history has been in oral history it's been um told to us it's um very undocumented um there is an entire generation of people I think of Amanda Lear I was thinking of a mandelier watching those who has you know continued to tell a different story about her life despite the fact this is a French pop star Muse icon who um has you know for 60 years denied her trans history despite it being very readily documented and available um these folks are still out there you know and I think that um you know I like that quote that you read from Jules because we focus on garfinkel because of the archive but we mentioned Robert Stoller a lot who was a psychiatrist and you know at the turn in the mid-century that was what Psychiatry was trying to do it was trying to tell the world something about people they were interviewing that those people didn't know about themselves right so um and It produced a certain kind of fact sheet almost with no names and just these details of like what kind of mother did they have did they share a bed after the age of five like that's probably what led to all these things right and I think what we wanted to do was something that wasn't that right I mean to recognize that like you know all the facts in the world are going to kind of bring this to life like it's much more about the embodiment and bringing people in to be a part of this history that we found in this like cabinet drawer you know thank you I mean I think that that calls into some of the questions around like the absence of presence the presence of absence something that I think Zachary you've talked a little bit about um you know in your practice and I'm curious if you can just to kind of how and maybe this goes too deep into like how did you you know materialize this character and and the subject in a way that um you know felt authentic to you um and you know as an artist already who yourself is is performing in different ways can you speak about you know this particular role and how you created that in some way the presence of absence that's such a beautiful thought and it here I mean hearing the audio tape from which I was listening back to in that scene um was so much like touching this person through time in this we are Time Travelers as humans um that's the incredible thing about being a human is that you live long enough to move and collapse time over and over again and um I felt very uh like it was a way of channeling which I think is what acting is about um I mean the best actors were able to completely lose themselves in a person um Agnes was so compelling to listen to she was clearly one step ahead of garfinkel and outwitting him at every beat in every answer and um despite loving Chase so much I just shot daggers at him with my eyes and that was coming not you know from an authentic place but rather from Agnes herself yeah and I think that one of the things that often gets edited out of transcripts and social sciences are these like kind of snarky moments from respondents and I think we put a premium on that that those are kind of verbatim though like I can put it in a box and take it home and pet it I mean it's like hilarious that someone said that in like 1959 like UCLA and I always say like we don't really I mean Agnes was like 19 years old being interviewed you know in 1959 and has you know this thing to say and a lot of the people had this kind of back and forth and I think that kind of agency and that wit and that humor and that knowledge gets so lost and you rarely get to see that I would say even in social science work today I think that that's an that's an interesting point and one that I saw and also you know Barbers and Jimmy's performances um are you know their their characters were were these sort of like moments where they're playing fully you know interacting with Garfunkel in a way and it made me think a little bit about you know the sort of ideas of representation and sort of like you know what are and this is something um uh from Ryan Wu the Bruin Film Society and I were emailing and he mentioned you know what are the benefits and costs of representation you know in terms of like being on the other side of that and Jules talks about this a little bit as well um but this film obviously plays with that and and also out of um I feel like narratives that we see around what you know trans representation should be quote unquote or whatever that is right and so it it seems to be I don't know playful playful without as well in a way and I'd love to hear you know to hear you talk a little bit about what that what that means to you is Ryan here yeah Ryan where are you right up there hi Ryan thanks for that question so I'm gonna did I did I ask that in a way that was helpful to you or do you wanna okay okay great thanks Ryan so let's go film studies film club geeky on the answer which is to say one of the ways in which the film is trying to think about representation is through investing in technology as portals to intimacy and to alienation so what does it mean that we capture the most intimate touch with our subjects when we're through the lens of a Super 8 camera something that we know is private and domestic and when we pop back to that 16 all of a sudden we're in a kind of gauge in a kind of Technology where there's a little bit more access we see trans people arrive in government and medical films in the 60s and 70s right and then we pop to the alienation the structured black and white shot reverse shot of the talk show that understands itself to be structured and shot for an audience neither of whom are on stage right and up to the kind of gloss of a 35 and so I'm definitely not trying to lecture in film studies but rather to say that we're trained how to think about trans people visually through the ways in which they are captured and represented and so if we can think about how technology teaches us and how technology is always instructing the gays the ways in which reviewing and therefore how people are presenting themselves goes back to us we can sort of slip that question about representation into a different place where it's less about casting it's less about who gets to do what when and instead how are we setting the frame through which we come to understand people in history it's like you have a PhD so I'm sure the audience has some questions so please Prime them while I um ask my sort of last question although I'll have follow-up if needed is is you know Chase and Kristen and obviously there's like just a strong UCLA presence of course in the film but also in your histories and the film is of course as it should be critical I mean you know of what took place here on campus many years ago and there's still action and work that needs to be done um what's it feel like to be back on campus here with this particular film um yeah I won't bring up the permits I promise you mean the parking permits yeah absolutely yeah but anyway I'd love to no you're fine um uh but I'm gonna get a ticket on the way yeah yeah we'll work that out um but yeah no if you could talk about you know what that means for you especially this film I mean jewels of course um speaks to this as well having you know been inside and outside of the institution and what that's felt like for you yeah I think one of the things that happens in the context of the film is we watch Jules reckon with her proximity to the institution her proximity to the kind of consumptive force of archival work and history making but arriving here I feel like we're with a bunch of buddies and I'm reminded of the vibrant Sparks of our like power together I mean I I'm not joking when I say I feel like I've learned how to be a queer person here for better and for worse and that's like a hugely significant part of my self-understanding as an artist and the ways in which UCLA was set up at the time that we were here afforded us the opportunity to make a now 20 plus year long friendship and to listen to the way in which you know Zachary literally moved into the space and was like I could tell the whole story of my life through what's happened in this theater and those are also very significant forms of kind of concurrent inhabitation that unsettled the easy ways to say like Ugh UCLA terrible violent history bad place like nothing is that simple and I hope that our film is trying to traffic around that question in a different way yeah I mean I agree I feel so excited that we got invited you know I was minting to you in our pre-call that not every University would be excited to think about its own history you know and I think um just from the actions that are still happening on campus I mean I was saying that Robert Stoller went on to run a gender clinic for children that you know caused I think a lot of damage to a whole generation of people who were put in it and it was activism from students that led to shutting it down right it was like articles in the Bruin comparing it to Clockwork Orange and saying that it was basically torture by gay and feminist groups that were part of the steps towards that right and so I think that um something I've always admired about an institution like UCLA is having like the ability to kind of reckon with the history and to really move forward I mean the gender recognition initiative that you mentioned I mean it's a really exciting moment I mean I feel very proud of my alma mater my other alma mater is the University of Texas and when I go back there I'm like oh my God it's like getting worse every second I mean um you know I mean it's like a bizarre experience to have gone there and feel that I was ever there on the campus and like it's just coming back here it's like such an opposite kind of feeling it's exciting to see all that movement and to think about like what we didn't have when we were here and what we couldn't even imagine when we were here you know and what's going to come in the future talk about time travel exactly time travel so oh and while it's critical of Academia I also feel like it's very generous it's a very generous gesture because culture exists and academic Academia you know frames culture and you know it's not a symbiotic relationship necessarily and so to bring an academic frame into a cultural uh space is keeping I think the institution itself vibrant and you're both such a wonderful examples of um you know radical ways of Reinventing pedagogy I feel like I've heard Chase say the word interlocutor so many times in our conversations and it really feels like the two of you have all the three of you the entire team has that kind of energy that you bring to the project and I think you know even I mean down to everybody who was involved but I mean um everyone who worked on sound who works on cinematography I mean it really was this very collaborative team project that we're so proud of kind of creating this community so anyone in the team who wants to ask them questions raise your hand or of course any students anyone in the audience there's um students here theater staff who are here to take questions so just raise your hand and they'll choose somebody you know um call out somebody in the middle and somebody here in the front hi so I just wanted to say first of all I am so immensely thrilled to see trans men in this film I I noticed that a lot of trans men and transmasculine people are very underrepresented both within and without the trans community and I guess my question is how do we take steps to remedy that and what do you make of that love the trans men in this film in in large part because they are kind of in my opinion like really formative early transcultural producers who were attending to your very question of what do we do about the perceived lack of transmasculine representation so we can look to Max's writing his very significant autobiography the testosterone files or silas's work films like by hercu by Crook and you know I think their early interventions into transmasculine cultural production has led to a number of very I would argue um significant cohort docs maybe you know them all but I'm going to name them right now films like Southern Comfort and the aggressives which are films about transmasculine history that are always positioning trans men alongside their peers and Community it's a real like strategic middle finger to the isolationism that we so often come to know about trans history and I think there are tons of transmasculine people who are making work and I think that work is emerging and you know happy to get geeky with you your time but I think that it that it is changing and it's through a kind of willingness to connect historical work to contemporary questions that some of that is is being done I see a question in the middle you can also scream it out I like that people in the middle are unafraid to go for the mic that's excellent thank you well thank you so much um so I have this experience of being an Alum who was also like super involved on campus and now I work with trans teens and I just all the time come across this the feeling that they're all like everyone feels like they're doing you know Reinventing the wheel they're doing everything for the first time in the world and I see so many you know current students here and I I wanted um all of your thoughts on that uh I also hear about like new University um you know committees on trans you know students and I think about like okay well like almost 10 years ago we had that too and they're probably doing some of the same things over again and I'm sure before me they were they had another one that they were doing you know and doing some of the same things there's kind of this cyclical you know having to like re-up things over over time I was wondering if you could talk on how you see that kind of almost kind of slightly cyclical but engaging with that like feeling that comes up so much of like you know oh I'm the first one to do this I must read do this I think that like giving this um giving this kind of Testament from the past kind of helps break that a bit but I want to know your perspectives on that I mean not to get geeky as a gender studies Professor but you know Audrey Lord would say that like one of the mechanisms of the reproduction of Oppression is the lack or like the actually siloing off of generations right and like not having connections between different generations and that that's how you kind of keep things like this always having to be in progress and never having actually made a change universities are the worst for this because people leave typically in a four-year cycle right and so you know you have to like try to put in this scaffolding that's going to like create new generations but there's a lot of things that work against you in that way um you know I think one of my formative experiences at UCLA was Ting for the introduction to lgbtq studies with Jim Schultz and I feel like that class changed my life again as a person who showed up here from Texas um but you know most universities don't have that my own University doesn't have that we don't have anybody who would teach it like you know I have students who come to my you know gender classes who don't know like about the the AIDS crisis in the 1980s who were queer students and so a lot of it is like if you don't teach a history right if you teach a really truncated history and if you like cut off this kind of intergenerational support and something I love about Zachary that you have this connection to you know the fabulous Sabrina and all these people and you know that history of Hollywood lawn is so important but it's really you know it's I think gotten even more bifurcated right and I think it's losing that kind of knowledge um and I think that that is something that institutions kind of do because it does throw a wrench into social change foreign so document everything and put it in special Collections and be like here's the work that we did at this time for the next person who tries to find it I see a question yeah yeah so um picking up on some of the things that people are already asking about I'm also thinking about how um the context uh for Trans lives has changed since uh you know very um so it's it's in part cyclical it's in in part kind of new in this particular iteration how has that shaped or how has that been maybe part of your thinking about the film about um where people might take this film take what they uh what they will from it and move forward how is that maybe changed over the course from the beginning of conceiving of the project till now yeah one of the ways to answer that is to think about how our use of the archival material changed over time so when we shot the short film which lands at 19 minutes long if you were to watch it you would be I think surprised by the amount of personal narrative work that we do as a way to stitch the historical to the Contemporary Zachary does a lot more like I grew up in this place I had these feelings and we sort of rely on that narrative framing device in order to build trust to build empathy to do certain kinds of narrative work and when we arrived to shoot the feature many of our incredible collaborators participants interlocutors whether explicit or not we're like no way I'm not gonna tell that story anymore Angelica we use the moment of conversation with Angelica in the film but that was definitely had in a variety of different ways in a variety of different circumstances where people are tired of telling certain kinds of stories and tired on relying upon a kind of I grew up in this place narration of Self in order to gain access and advocate for their dignity and right to self-determination and so one of the things we try to do in the future is actually do that same kind of work through different Pathways and so if we avoid the kind of trap of the personal how do we think about the structural how do we think about the institutional how do we literally set our sights on the frame and actually depressurize the ways in which we've come to expect trans people to show up to those questions hi um I just wanted to ask there's something that Jules mentioned about how and particularly with George's case there's this sort of need to not make it about what she wants Georgia to be or what she wants these sort of cases and stories to be and I'm wondering how you balance the need to be aware of your own biases and your own um looking at these stories and and what you wanted them to be while also making sure that you humanize them and brought them to life that's a great question I've been doing a lot of talking I can keep talking great um thank you for that question um there's a couple different ways that that I think would be fun to answer it one of which is to talk about the collaboration with Brook siebold our editor who continually Returns the frame to story and to feeling and really is constantly asking well who is your audience like who are you trying who are we trying to make this film for who do we want to invite into the kind of conversation and a kind of rigorous return to that over time really transformed the story that arrives on screen and a secondary sort of layer of that rigorous accountability happened the night before we went to camera with Jules where we all sat in an LA Airbnb and screened the filming process in small string outs to jewels and engaged in her real-time reactions to some of the choices we were already making and so what you're feeling and seeing on screen especially as it relates to the moment with Georgia is a is an internal critique of the project Jules is speaking back to some of the choices we were already making and we're changing the film in real time we're changing the film as we're making it in service of those kinds of of Reflections and I think that those Reflections are about consequences so all of our team is differently saying well if you do that it produces that consequence is that where you want to go well if you put that there then that's the direction we're going to go what path are we going to take and so in some ways it's through that kind of ongoing writing of the project would have which happened until we locked constantly throwing Cuts back to our team to say like how are we feeling where are we going and it's from that place that we were able to sort of stage and ride that line as best as we could between feeling but also not getting lost in feeling to return to my mini lecture on form and the ways in which right feeling can sometimes allow us to sidesteps other forms of accountability and complicity I think and I also see you so yeah let's um oh shoot that was really loud um so I had to like write this down because I could not remember it for the life of me but um I said the film mentioned this idea of art making as a queer person is empowering but also makes you feel somehow like you should shut yourself out of creating an experienced Life as a queer person and like that idea of uh just like shutting yourself out and not wanting to understand yourself as a queer person um uh my question is what issues did you face as a queer person creating this film and coming to UCLA or coming from UCLA how did you think learning to be a queer person here has affected this work sorry that's a really big question you know I mean one of the easy ways to to walk toward that question is to say that I came to UCLA to go to theater school and in a first go-round I hope no one who was in that room is in this room in the first go round of introductions there was a lot of people saying like I'm here and I want to be a star you know I'm here and I want to move toward the industry in a very strategic way and I got to tell you they were very good at it it was awesome and some people have extraordinary careers and I have incredible respect for that work and I remember it being in that room being like is that what I want is that why I'm here and I kind of stepped away from theater film and television as a as a momentum toward activist cultures and started working with you know social justice orgs and started making work in a much more DIY much more gritty space that was organized around a different set of Aesthetics and organized around a different set of questions and it's through those kinds of choices that I think I understood queerness differently and then walk back toward the industrial mainstream kind of with those tools I also want a flag that I see you humans over here as well oh my gosh okay hi I'm this is like such an honor to just be like sitting in front of such brilliant queer professionals first of all it's amazing um second of all not to out myself here but I am a theater major as well and I and I uh part of the reason that I want to like pursue theater is to be that representation that I lacked when I was growing up and um and I get I'm like this quarter I get to do that I'm going to be in a show where I get to portray a trans masculine character and I'm very excited about that but this show this this this film also like reminded me of there was this thing that Jules said about like the those people that weren't shown those people that got to live their lives without having to be put in these situations and my kind of question to you guys is how do you and your like personal lives balance being that representation and also living for yourself it's threading a needle I mean sometimes you fail and sometimes I think it's yeah you're more gracefully able to navigate it but I with great privilege comes great responsibility and I think that for those of us who are um able and comfortable existing in public spheres we really have um a moral obligation to do our part to push this forward and to and first do this work for the rest of our lives simultaneously and you know is the future is better and worse simultaneously um in this film you're witnessing the origins of the the trans medical industrial complex which is at the center of the culture wars today with pediatric treatment of of gender dysphoria so it's an interesting line and I think that your question was also extrapolating on you know attacks on trans life today they're not going away I mean this is not something that we're going to witness the end of in our lifetimes it will just continue to transform and stories from the past are impermeable they're undeniable um you cannot dismiss them as like the imagination of Hollywood like these people existed um we have existed forever and um by occupying you know public space um putting ourselves out there um it's a sacrifice but I think it's worth it and then yeah balancing it being private not feeling like you have to yeah I was going to say one of the things that I learned through being friends with Zachary is a an investment in privacy right as like a Strategic investment in knowing when you're on and knowing when you're off and actually trying to invest in that in that boundary and to recognize the power of opacity and the power of unknowability is one of the reasons why you can turn out in in different ways and you know I think that theater just to keep talking about the discipline um is such a hyper-controlled environment right where you get to make really strategic choices and I think that theater is a really in is really interesting training for kind of publicness because you're always I'm going to use the word dissociated but I'm going to use it strategically to say you're doing one thing and you're doing 10 things back here right at the same time and that's like very similar to any kind of public performance and it's actually a throw to our friend Lauren Berlin who summarizes teaching in a very similar way you're teaching and you're also trying to process all of the affects and emotions and feelings and strategies at the same time I think there's a lot to be shared by sort of de-exceptionalizing performance or the Public Presentation of Self and thinking about how we're all doing it all the time in different ways and I think also I mean thinking about ways in which like Academia or you know theater or cultural production really primary like puts a focus on the solo author right and I think that is something that is really difficult because when you're that visible you know this is the like burning up under the microscope that um your magnifying glass that Angelica says and I think you know figuring out how to make a world right with people who are going to help when you know you can't be as visible or when you can't you know that they're going to help support you and you're going to help them and trying to build a world together where everybody is doing well right where like everybody is like doing the work that they want to do and like sometimes it's collaborative and sometimes it isn't but I think building that kind of world and connection is so important um you know and again just plug for intergenerational tubes go back to that but and I feel like we could talk about this for very long time some of these topics are so fascinating and tomorrow we'll delve a little bit deeper too into these conversations if you have more burning questions you should join us tomorrow at seven Refreshments will be served at six at the Charles Young Library on campus in the conference room there'll be signs when you get there that's also free we really hope that you can join and have some conversations with Kristen Chase and also Vanessa Warren who's a PhD student at uucla as well so um you said you know the future is both scary a version of the future is both scary and also promising and I think that what you've brought tonight is is part of the promising part and we really just appreciate you coming to the archive so thank you please join me thank you our colleagues