On Monday night, Dirty Looks NYC founder Bradford Nordeen presented a specially curated selection of queer DIY films at REDCAT theater in downtown Los Angeles. The lineup included influential punk and queercore filmmakers G.B. Jones, Jill Reiter, Greta Snider, Rick Castro, and Jonesy. Many of the films captured the brief creative outburst of queer punks in Toronto in the late 1980s and early ’90s, who used zines as a creative outlet and a networking tool for their small yet vibrant marginalized subculture. Castro, Jonesy, and Reiter were present to discuss their work and answer questions after the screening.

Some films were antinarrative, others full of narrative camp: G.B. Jones The Troublemakers follows a crew of shoplifters but quickly scatters into a succession of chaotic street scenes, while Jill Reiter’s The Birthday Party imagines a girl’s sixteenth birthday party with her drag queen mother and a surprise stripper guest. Rick Castro’s hilarious Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate from Three Faces of Women features Vaginal Davis and Bruce LaBruce as “drag queen lesbian” lovers in a romantic tiff, who hire a Freudian sex therapist to spice up their relationship. On the serious side was Scott Trealeven’s documentary look at the Salivation Army, a Toronto queercore gang that developed into a radical international cult by publishing a popular (but short-lived) zine. The selection was eclectic, but showcased diverse approaches to queer filmmaking that resisted the mainstream or homogenizing narratives that had begun to appear in the 1990s.