This talk explores queer and trans cinema’s use of psychedelics to bend genre and gender perceptions from the 1960s to contemporary films. This evening focuses on how these films use psychedelic aesthetics, avant-garde editing techniques, and superimposition to blend reality and fiction, documentary and sci-fi, opening up new cinematic forms that project gender beyond the binary. Through psychedelic unsettling of time and space, these works fabulate the past and speculate on futures beyond restrictive gender norms, offering a visionary reimagining of cinematic form and content.

We begin discussing Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966), a series of live shows that combined experimental films, performances by The Velvet Underground, and a trippy, immersive experience that captured the darker, edgier side of 1960s psychedelia. Moving through the decades, the talk explores James Broughton's The Potted Psalm (1946) and Shaman Psalm (1981), which anesthetize surreal, shamanistic visions, and Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and Normal Love (1963), known for their provocative, avant-garde imagery. Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) offers a groundbreaking depiction of Tokyo’s queer and trans subculture, blending documentary and experimental techniques to explore the fluidity of gender, identity, and genre. Barbara Hammer’s experimental films from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Psychosynthesis (1975), Women I Love (1976), Pools (1981), and Bent Time (1984), use avant-garde techniques and psychedelic imagery to create deeply immersive experiences.

The evolution of psychedelic aesthetics in queer trans cinema culminates in contemporary works like Zackary Drucker’s At Least You Know You Exist (2011), which navigates the real and the unconscious through a site-specific exploration of trans performativity and delayed time. The Adventure of Iron Pussy (Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Michael Shaowanasai 2003), a Thai musical-action comedy film, stars a trans queer protagonist and is a homage and parody of the 1970s Thai action films, musicals, and melodramas. The talk concludes with Neptune Frost (Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman 2021) an Afrofuturist film that blends magical realism, sci-fi, and a dazzling musical vision of a queer-led techno future.

Two screenings follow the talk: Chris E. Vargas’s ONE for All... (2012, 7 min.), which examines the complex legacy of trans philanthropist Reed Erickson who funded trans medicine and ketamine research from 1960 to 1980s, blending documentary and speculative elements, and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964, 28 min.), which juxtaposes homoerotic biker imagery with occult and pop culture references, creating a mesmerizing, rebellious vision that has influenced countless filmmakers. Notably, the cishet male participants of the film were told they were being filmed for a documentary. By blending reality and fiction, truths, and fabulations, these films invite audiences to explore alternative realities and envision futures beyond restrictive gender binaries and genre distinctions, offering mind and body-altering spectatorship.

Slava Greenberg is an Assistant Professor of Film in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship (Indiana UP, 2023). Currently, Greenberg is writing his second book, Gender Dysphoria: An Unauthorized Biography.