“Vaseline, Queer Policing, & Moving Image Legacy: A Conversation with Malic Amalya & Hogan Seidel” in Analog Cookbook, Issue 7: Analog Erotica, edited by Kate E. Hinshaw: June 2023
Hogan: How do you see erotic imagery being used as a tool or how do you see it as a vehicle for change?
Malic: In the [San Francisco Bay Area] there’s a queer direct action collective called Gay Shame. One of their actions that I went to was a protest of a prison-themed pride party hosted by Kink.com. While the event was happening, Gay Shame projected, “Pro-Sex, Anti-Prison, Queers for Abolition” outside of the San San Francisco Armory, Kink’s studio and party venue.
In conversation about the the event, Eric Stanley, an organizer for Gay Shame, explained that prisons don’t just policy gender, they actually create categories of gender.
What Gay Shame and other anti-racist prison abolitionists have illuminated for me is that, yes, queer liberation is sex positivity, kink positivity, gender self-determination, and a culture of consent. AND, we can’t live in a pro-sex, pro-queer, pro-gender self-determination culture without prison abolition.
Malic: For me, [Vaseline] is a conjuring of trans fag sexuality. At the risk of being too vulnerable, it was literally a way to negate my gender dysphoria, especially as I was navigating spaces that are predominately comprised of cis-gay men….
Hogan: [Vaseline] was also … sort of censored by this film lab but then it also came back to being shown at Anthology Film Archive. There’s something kind of radical about that but, at the same time, even after decency laws were abolished, now 80 years later we are still seeing censorship and the policing of queer and trans bodies rear its ugly head.
“Pest Control: Malic Amalya’s RUN! Explores Precarity and Complicity Under American Militarism,” essay by Greg Youmans
“In one of the final shots, a radioactive piece of trinitite, residue from the atomic blast, is placed gently and almost ritualistically into Amalya’s sand-filled mouth. Following Mary Douglas’s classic theory of abjection, this act and image break down the symbolic boundary between ingestion and expulsion, between what is deemed clean and permitted entry into the physical/social body and what is deemed unclean and expelled. RUN! is not simply a critique of warmongering patriots by a pacifist leftist. It is a complex film by a white, American, queer, trans, and antiracist filmmaker who grapples at once with both his complicity and vulnerability.” Greg Youmans, 2023
Dirty Looks volume 1
edited by Clara Lopez Menendez and Bradford NoRdeen
The Troublemakers, G.B. Jones, Super 8, 1990
"The One the Photographer Makes Use Of: An 8mm Ethnography of Home Movies and their Queer Counterparts," essay by Malic Amalya
Dirty Looks Inc. 2016
“Forced into secrecy and suppression or rejected and kicked out of the home, queers are discarded from their own home movies. Friend [by Jonesy, 1992], The Troublemakers [by G.B. Jones, 1990], and the rest of the hardcore home movies presented by Dirty Looks place the queer back in small gage, consumer-grade cinema….
These directors, through their characters and techniques, make use of the queer with their debauchery, chaos, crime, truancy, and hedonism, as viable — if not liberating — alternatives to the violent breeding ground of normalcy.” Malic Amalya
Exhibition Catalog, Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? Videos by Chris E. Vargas
“Splash and Counter-Splash: The Performative Wailings of Chris Vargas’ Cry Boy Cry,” essay by Malic Amalya
Anthology Film Archives; New York, NY: 2013
Cry Boy Cry by Chris Vargas, 2012