“Radical queers haven’t yet figured out how to use film as politics; we’ve done it with performance and spoken word, but not with film. The assimilationists are winning the war because they’ve learned how to use film as propaganda by wrapping their message in the preferred discourse of civil rights.”
I did an interview with Eric Stanley and Christ Vargas, the creators of the film Criminal Queers, for Bitch magazine. It can be found here.
Excerpt:
CV: Queer and transgender people of color have been disproportionately targeted by the PIC. The politics of prison abolition is not new, but the emphasis on incarceration is so culturally pervasive that it is hard to talk about dismantling prisons without getting people anxious that a killer will knock down their door if prisons don’t exist. That’s where our diy and camp aesthetic works in our favor. The movie, I hope, is so ridiculous and entertaining to watch that even if the ideas we present are radical, they can be digested, examined, and talked about without force or intimidation.