A five-film series I programmed for Alamo with Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay -- dates and tickets here!

"Sometimes milestones are bittersweet. This year marks the 70th anniversary of one of the earliest films to openly explore transgender lives, Ed Wood’s infamous debut GLEN OR GLENDA – all while an ongoing assault against trans lives escalates at the hands of state legislatures, including no fewer than 57 anti-trans bills in Alamo Drafthouse’s home state of Texas. As trans issues continue to be endlessly debated by legislators and rights are being stripped away at a frightening pace, we offer a selection of five films spanning those past 70 years to serve as irrefutable proof that we aren’t just some recent new phenomenon – we’ve always been here. From a spectacular performance by Karen Black in Robert Altman’s COME BACK TO THE 5 AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN and the groundbreaking Spanish documentary DRESSED IN BLUE to the low-budget New Queer Cinema buddy crime classic BY HOOK OR BY CROOK, these films foreground transness in a way that still feels bracing and empowering all these years later. And to help provide proper context, each screening will be accompanied by a prerecorded introduction and discussion with historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell and critics Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner, coauthors of the upcoming book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: An Examination of Trans Film Images in Cinema."