Three Dollar Cinema: The Down and Dirty DIY of Queer Production

Abstract

©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois i met them below the bridge shortly after 9:00 a.m., bearing coffee and breakfast tacos: a motley assembly of misfit mediamakers, arty queers, and nonconformist nerds like me, all scattered among the trash­cluttered banks of Waller Creek in downtown Austin, Texas. This was not the first time I had visited the set of a CHRISTEENE music video, but it was my first day “on the job” as a cursory member of the “Workin’ on Grandma” crew. After I delivered the breakfast buffet, director PJ Raval and per­ former Paul Soileau (aka CHRISTEENE) brain­ stormed shooting concepts and delegated the day’s duties. My first assignment was to keep cinematographer Mike Simpson from tumbling into the creek—putrid as it was from the human waste that had accumulated there from Aus­ tin’s barhopping hipster gentry and the city’s attendant growing homeless population. I was a graduate student at the University of Texas who had been studying queer media subcul­ tures from behind the distanced safety of my books, and this sordid scenario marked my in­ troduction to flesh­and­blood queer production practice: standing protectively beside Simpson as he balanced precariously on a set of slippery stones at the edge of the foul creek, attempt­ ing to obtain the perfect angle on CHRISTEENE as she emerged from underneath the bridge, refreshed from a morning bowel movement. Months later, my production education would continue on the set of CHRISTEENE’s “African Mayonnaise,” an endeavor, as recounted later in this article, that would find me and the crew on the run from a well­orchestrated pack of Scientologists, a set of persistent mall cops on Segways, and finally, the encroaching police just outside the Barton Springs Mall.2 These shambolic scenes of queer creation, which initiated my border crossing from queer scholar to queer producer, are a colorful cry from the ubiquitous visions of slick studio shoots, professional production offices, and formal writers’ rooms that are proffered within many contemporary academic accounts of the American3 media industries. Yet it is precisely within such spaces of material scarcity and low­ brow scruff—through rather rudimentary and resourceful means—that most queer media has been made, both in the past and in the pres­ ent: the history of queer production is by and large a history of do­it­yourself (DIY) practice, a fact born out of both necessity and design. Despite the reality of DIY’s predominance within the queer cultural realm, however, recent work in queer production studies, particularly curran nault is a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture (Routledge, 2018). He is also the founder and artistic director of the Austin­ based queer transmedia nonprofit OUTsider. Three Dollar Cinema: The Down and Dirty DIY of Queer Production