Projecting Homosexuality: Queer and Trans Visions from Cinema’s First Decades
June 4, 11, 18, & 25, 2025
Richard Oswald, "Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others)," 1919, film still. UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Leontine Sagan, "Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform)," 1931, Kino Lorber.
Tickets are $15 for each night of the series; $5 for students with a valid student ID. Must be purchased on the website. No tickets available at the door. Student IDs checked at the door. Screenings will be at FACETS, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614.
Buckle up for a wild ride through the forgotten corners of early cinema! “Projecting Homosexuality” is a groundbreaking film series that will blow your mind with rarely seen gems from the dawn of moviemaking. Imagine stumbling into a secret world where gender-bending performers, radical social uprisings, and forbidden desires dance across the silver screen. From a beefcake muscleman posing in the world’s earliest films to lesbian love stories that challenged every social norm, these movies aren’t just history – they’re a time machine to a more subversive, surprising past that feels irresistibly modern.
This isn’t your grandparents’ dusty film archive – this is a revolution captured on celluloid. Spanning from the United States to Sweden, France, Germany, and Japan, these films will make you laugh, gasp, and see early 20th-century culture in a radically new light. Whether you’re a film buff, a queer history enthusiast, or just someone who loves discovering incredible stories that have been hidden for a century, this series promises an unforgettable journey. Get ready to peek through the keyhole of cinema’s most daring and delicious secrets.
Curator
Film Series developed and curated by Laura Horak: Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. She investigates the history of transgender and queer film and media in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. She is co-curator of the 99-film Bluray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (Rutgers 2016), and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana 2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers 2019), Somatechnics 8.1 (2018) on trans/cinematic/bodies, a 2022 “In Focus” section of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on transing cinema and media studies, and a 2024 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities on trans and queer digital humanities. Horak is a white cis queer settler scholar who is here to leverage her privilege and institutional resources for the revolution.
Through the Keyhole: Shorts Program
Buy Tickets |119 minutes + intermission
Learn about the films here.
FEATURED SPEAKER: Laura Horak – Curator of The First Homosexuals Film Series. Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal.
MUSICIAN: David Drazi, piano – David has been playing the piano professionally for over 40 decades. With a special talent for accompanying silent films, David was a guest accompanist in 2003, 2004 and 2006 at the Pordenone, Italy Silent Film Festival. David currently records piano accompaniments to silent films for several DVD producers and Grapevine Video.
Love and Suffering
Buy Tickets| 119 minutes
Learn about the films here.
FEATURED SPEAKER: Patrick Friel – Patrick is a Chicago-based educator and film programmer. He is currently an Adjunct Instructor at Columbia College Chicago and has previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the former Program Director at Chicago Filmmakers (1996-2007) and the Festival Director and Programmer of the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival (2001-2015). In 2008 he founded the independent alternative film screening series White Light Cinema. He has presented freelance programs at many venues and festivals, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Cinematheque Ontario, and Anthology Film Archives. He was the Managing Editor of the on-line Chicago film resource Cine-File from 2008-2021. Friel has also served as a festival judge, festival pre-screener, film festival panelist, grant review panelist, guest speaker, symposium co-organizer, and has written for Film Comment, Cineaste, Afterimage, Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, and Senses of Cinema. He has an M.A. from Northwestern University and a B.A. from Indiana University.
MUSICIAN: Olya Prohorova, violin – Olya is a Moldovan-born violinist, vocalist, and bandleader based in Chicago. Classically trained and globally versatile, she has performed with artists including John Legend, PJ Morton, Kirk Franklin, Chronixx, and Jennifer Hudson (Chicago Theatre), and toured with Stevie Wonder in 2024. Olya leads the gypsy punk band FUGU DUGU, the J-pop duo ORiHANA, and is a featured artist at The Green Mill. Her sound blends Eastern European roots with jazz, punk, pop, and beyond.
Gender Benders
Buy Tickets| 120 minutes
Learn about the films here.
FEATURED SPEAKER: Nat Modlin – Nat is a PhD Candidate in Germanic Studies and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, their work focuses on 20th and 21st-century German film, literature, and visual media, centering around environment, fluidity, and genderqueerness. Their literary translations and criticism have appeared in TRANSIT and Chicago Review, and they are co-editing a forthcoming special issue of Monatshefte on “Monstrous Identities.” At the University of Chicago, they co-organize the Mass Culture Workshop and the Interdisciplinary German Seminar.
MUSICIAN: Peter Maunu, guitarist/violinist – Peter has toured, performed and recorded with a long list of diverse musicians including Charles Lloyd, Jean-Luc Ponty, Bobby McFerrin, Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Charlie Haden, Archie Shepp, and Grace Slick. As the guitarist on the Arsenio Hall Show, he performed nightly with legends like Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Ringo Starr, Madonna, Ray Charles, NWA, Public Enemy, and many more. Additionally, Peter contributed to the soundtracks of film scores including Crash, Bobby, Food Inc., and tv shows Chicago Hope, Arrested Development and CSI New York. Since relocating to Chicago, he has performed and recorded with improvisers Jack Wright, Gerrit Hatcher, Julian Kirshner, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Zoots Houston, Dave Rempis, Tim Daisy, Michael Zerang, Mars Williams, Jim Baker, Carol Genetti, Tomeka Reid, Katherine Young, Jason Roebke, Avreeyal Ra, Ed Wilkerson Jr., dancer Ayako Kato and many others. In addition, he founded, curates and performs at Splice Series, a bimonthly improvisation series at the Beat Kitchen in Chicago.
Girls in Love
Buy Tickets| 154 minutes
Learn about the films here.
FEATURED SPEAKER: Sarah McDaniel, Ph.D. – Sarah is a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities, Department of English, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, The University of Chicago.
MUSICIANS: Kioto and Tatsu Aoki, Japanese drums and strings – Father-daughter duo Kioto Aoki and Tatsu Aoki are Chicago-based artists, educators and musicians, maintaining the legacy of traditional Japanese music in Chicago and beyond.
Tatsu is a leading advocate for the Asian American community, as well as a prolific composer, a performer of traditional and experimental music forms, a filmmaker, and an educator. Born in Tokyo into the Toyoakimoto artisan family and performing by the age of four, he holds the name Toyoaki Sanjuro as the 4th generation of the Toyoakimoto family. In the early 1970s, Aoki was active in Tokyo’s underground arts movement with experimental arts and music. In 1977, Aoki left Tokyo and is now one of the most in-demand performers of bass, shamisen, and taiko, contributing to more than ninety recording projects and touring internationally over the last 35 years. He is noted for being the longest associated bassist for the late Chicago legend Fred Anderson.
Studying under her father Tatsu, Kioto has been standing on the professional stage from the age of 7, continues the family legacy as musician on taiko and tsuzumi; and holds the name Toyoaki Chitose (豊秋千東勢) as the 5th generation of the Toyoakimoto household. Working within traditional and experimental contexts as a second generation Japanese American, Aoki sustains this musical lineage traversing geographical and cultural boundaries. Kioto’s playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma and emphasizes the melodic phrasing of space and choreography to reorient the notion of percussion as mere rhythm. Her stoic, durational explorations elicit soundscapes that project organic textures of live performance and sonic nuances of cyclical, droning sustain. Aoki balances the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a contemporary sensibility, bringing taiko to contemporary artistic ecologies of music, sound and performance and extending her practice beyond measures of cultural preservation.
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