October 2011

The whole thing’s at CounterPulse, 1310 Mission Street in San Francisco, November 3-5, with sliding scale admission $12-15 each night. If you’re interested in attending, it’s highly recommended that you buy tickets in advance at Brown Paper Tickets, since last year’s event not only sold out — it broke CounterPulse’s all-time attendance record. The SFTFF, true to the heart of San Francisco’ss transgender and gender-variant community, has cast a wide and inclusive net thanks to the attentions of its many volunteers, Fresh Meat Productions and the Festival’s longtime artistic director, Shawna Virago.

Weirdly, the Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival is on the very same dates, which sounds like it would really put a damper on a few travel plans.

Anyway, back to the SFTFF! The live performances are on Thursday, November 3, starting at at 8pm, and the all-short-film-format runs on Friday and Saturday, November 4 and November 5, with different films each night. As the website says, the films feature “enticing tales of defiance, bullying, relationships, sex, humor, enchantment and romance…This year’s Festival features an award-winning mix of international films from countries including Thailand, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Canada, Singapore, Germany, Scotland, England, South Africa and The Netherlands.”

The Thursday performance gig features Annie Danger, D’Lo, Natsha Muse, Storm Miguel Florez, Butch Tap, Kentucky Fried Woman, Shawna Virago, Eli Conley and more, and is hosted by Fairy Butch. On Friday, the films include “Love and Other Red Spot Specials,” about a shoplifting transperson in an isolated Australian town; the German “Ring Frei,” about a transman boxer, “Robin Hood is So Gay,” in which Sherwood Forest’s hero is tweaked right back to his ultra-gay roots. There’s also “Butch Tits,” in which butch women “discuss the sometimes complicatated relationship they have with their breasts,” and that’s just to mention a few.

Another of Friday’s short films sounds like a fascinating documentary and an important addition to trans history: “Changing House” by Z.A. Martohardjono, in which “Rusty and Chelsea are a transgender lesbian couple who devoted 15 years to making their Brooklyn home a communal living space for transgender women in need and transgender civil rights organizers, including Stonewall legend Sylvia Rivera.”

Saturday’s films include the California premiere of Nikki Lee Taylor’s “The Lusty Gypsies.” — “On the stage it’s glitz and glitter, but backstage the gloves come off: the choices and differences between Drag and Transsexual performers are explored.”

Saturday also includes what sound like two amazing historical films, one fictional but inspired by a real story, and one the California premiere of rare historical documents. “Lili Longed to Feel Her Insides” is a “short fairy tale” inspired by the life of Lili Elbe, who died in 1931 of complications from one of the first (attempted) male-to-female gender reassignment surgeries — a procedure that included the transplantation of a uterus (she appears to have died from tissue rejection). And “Dayzee Dee’s Dazzling Drag Balls” is “[A] rare super 8mm film of pre-Stonewall Brooklyn drag balls plus contemporary interviews with early drag ball organizers.” Another of Saturday’s offerings, “The Panty Man,” tells “The true story of a man’s obsession with female panties and his denial of his sexuality.”

Remember, last year’s Festival broke attendance records at CounterPulse, so buy tickets in advance! Find out more about the SFTFF at www.sftff.org, and while you’re at it, you can hit the Twitterverse to follow both the SF Transgender Film Festival and Fresh Meat Productions and even “like” Fresh Meat and SFTFF on Facebook, if you do that sort of thing.

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Perfect for the day: happy Halloween!

Do visit the dark eros over at Jeffrey Scott’s website Factory 1019. While the images are lushly dark like the ones in this Halloween post, it was difficult not to select for you the cream of the crop, which I think are in the mechanical girls series – and there are so very many. I especially love those, the pleasure models and Nexus babes, “upgraded” maids and twisted Vaudeville themes with siamese twins, but I do the doll/mannequin themes are also exquisite. Look in all three portfolios.

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• Photographer Curtis Joe Walker teamed up with Plush Suicide to shoot a gritty-sexy set (and video) Introducing: The TERROR! Chambre – they have apparently been shooting scary pre-Halloween photos in it all month.
• This video is spooky enough to go in a sex-themed Halloween roundup: androgynous Anna Selezneva in Santa Sangre.
• Vice has this very bizarre, slightly unsettling collection of ten interviews with horror movie actresses and what turns them on (image of Monique Dupree, via).
• Weird photo essay, an interpretation of Halloween from Germany: topless girl pupmkinheads.
• Hardcore from Kink: three mean dominatrixes come back from the dead to dominate a male submissive.
• Hardcore from Kink: a girl and fucking machines in a ‘graveyard.’
• Not erotic, but so very excellent: don’t miss these great, very dark, sometimes dryly funny zombie stories by Thomas Roche – they are damn well done and must-reads for fans of action-filled zombie fiction.

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This fun, slow motion glittery spank video is by Photography Factory UK via Unscathed Corpse. I also really liked their slow motion film of a smiling girl in a bikini jumping rope:

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Filles De Nuit in the Fall 2011 issue of Treats Magazine is a wonderfully dark and sexy, Blade Runner-esque photo editorial that fits with the season. Do take a look. The accompanying video is embedded below and its style is completely inspiring for a noir-speakeasy sex vibe (which I love), although the music is not to my taste. No matter, it’s quite hot… and don’t miss the photographer Steven Lyon‘s dreamy, glossy, sexed-up site. Along with sultry female nudes, it’s chock full of hot men, too.

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