To chat with Elizabeth Purchell is to dive into everything from jokes about transitioning to some wild tales about the annals of gay pornography. Though perhaps hyperbolic, it isn’t unfair to call her one of queer cinema’s coolest multi-hyphenates: filmmaker, historian, archivist, and, above all else, programmer. 

For the last decade, Purchell has been screening films all over the country, from Florida to Austin and now, regularly, in New York City. These programs range from under-seen gems, like her multiple incredible Rosa von Praunheim series at Spectacle, to pictures that were once considered lost, like the 16mm print of Sex Demon that she scanned and shared with the world. That very print is part of a collection of over a hundred – with many adult titles from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s (like Deep Throat, HANDsome, and Sulka’s Daughter), but extending to mainstream features like Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (which was also scanned and made available for digital screenings), William Friedkin’s Cruising, and Prince’s Sign ‘o’ the Times, among many others. 

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But her work extends beyond these films and screenings, down to her feature film Ask Any Buddy, which mines over a hundred pieces of adult gay cinema into a massive supercut and her podcasts Ask Any Buddy and Cruising the Movies (with co-host KJ Shepherd) serving as a means of sharing the history behind many of the films she has screened and included in her work. Everything she seems to do is about exploring the history that comes with and around these cultural objects, which comes with an abundance of wild tales about the films she screens (some of which we’ll share below). 

With five years of screening Ask Any Buddy under her belt, and upcoming screenings like Glen or Glenda at IFC Center and a fifteen hour Jess Franco marathon at Spectacle, INTO sat down with Purchell to discuss her history with presenting and preserving cinema, as well as the journey she’s been on as a trans woman in the realm of film. 

INTO: Let’s start by noting it’s been a whopping five years since Ask Any Buddy started its tour and you’ve had a number of festival screenings, theatrical showings, and everyone frequently requesting it and talking about it. How does it feel to have that kind of longevity? 

ELIZABETH PURCHELL: The neverending life of Ask Any Buddy is kind of overwhelming and stressful to me, but, at the same time, it’s profoundly gratifying. When I initially made it for the Contrast Film Festival in Austin in 2019, I truly only thought it would play this one night and that would be the end of it. Everything that’s happened since had been a nice little surprise: the fact that I was able to get some bookings after that, the fact that it did get distribution and started getting into festivals. 

For a while, I had mixed feelings about it from a mix of transitioning and constantly getting messages from people asking how they could see it. But now I’m at a point where I’m just very proud of it and the way it’s gotten people interested in this kind of film that’s been kind of forgotten about, leading to this sort of revival of gay adult film history. I’m also proud that a lot of different audiences have seen this thing and that they respond to it and sometimes have these profound reactions to it. I’ve had multiple people tell me that it helped them come out to themselves! 

Looking back on it now, it is very personal in a way I don’t think it was at the time; it is kind of touching to have that and to see this “cis gay male” thing is actually very trans. 

I wanted to ask about viewing AAB as a trans film. I know some other critics have written about it through that lens, like Sally Jane Black’s writing from this year, but I wanted to hear your perspective, not just as the creator but also as someone who had to navigate transitioning throughout its release and how your perception of yourself changed.

I think one of the reasons why I got interested in these films in the first place is that I was trying to teach myself how to be a gay man. I had been out as a gay guy for a number of years, I was in a relationship that I’m still in, and I was, by all means, successful as a gay man, but I didn’t feel successful. It didn’t come naturally and easily to me, and I think getting interested in these films was educational and instructive in a way. Immersing myself in the magazines, the newspapers, the history, and all the ephemera, it was like, “Here’s how I can teach myself to be better at disguising myself this way?” 

In the process of making the movie, this other stuff was bubbling up underneath. I swear I didn’t plan it this way, but, over the course of the movie itself, it goes from all this dangerous outdoor sex in the first half into the indoor bar and club and party scene, with all these trans people and drag queens just randomly starting to show up. I didn’t mean for them to be in there necessarily, they just kind of wound up in there. 

I do think there’s something inherently trans about the film, because it is about taking this preexisting material, cutting it up and turning it into new things. And, for me, the fact that you can create this kind of tenuous but very distinct new narrative using clips from over a hundred movies is a very trans thing. It’s creating this kind of idealized new future out of the past. 

And that kind of extends to the short edits you post online, like removing all the women from Russ Meyers’ films, or exclusively keeping the whip pans. All of this is about mining existing things and finding what is and isn’t the focus of the frame, if that makes sense. What is it that draws you to finding these unique connective tissues within existing works? 

I think there’s something very soothing and fascinating to me about this idea of taking these very tightly constructed pieces of media and taking them apart shot by shot. There are a couple of sequences in Ask Any Buddy where the idea was to take these really well cut together sequences, undo all the cuts, and slot in new material, to build out from. Seeing the way these filmmakers were constructing their films gave me such a new appreciation for the craft and the filmmaking. For Russ Meyer specifically, he is such a masterful filmmaker and editor, specifically in these films that are so rapid fire, and I love ungluing all the splices and turning them back into individual shots. Sometimes I just pick up on things when I’m watching a film, like the fact that there are a hundred whip pans in this one movie. If you remove every shot that features a person, you’re just left with seventy seconds of his whip pans, and it’s weirdly incredible to watch.

It’s intoxicating! 

And I’m very fascinated by the material characteristics of film. One of the best examples I could give of this is that I worked at a film distribution company that had a 35mm print of Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die A Woman, and there was a weekend where I went to one of the theaters where they store all their materials and just pulled it off the shelf and spent an afternoon looking through each reel one at a time. It was such a fascinating experience, both because of the film and the print itself: Wishman originally shot the film in the early 70s under one name, and then shot new material in the late 70s, and the later material was all shot on 16mm but blown up to 35mm. You can tell looking at it, visually, what was literally chopped out and then spliced in. 

The fact that you can create this…tenuous but very distinct new narrative using clips from over a hundred movies is a very trans thing. It’s creating this kind of idealized new future out of the past. 

Elizabeth Purchell

Obviously a lot of your work involves scanning prints and working with digital artifacts, but would you ever want to edit something with those physical film materials? 

I’ve always wanted to do physical found footage work, but prints are expensive. I now have prints of a handful of movies that are in Ask Any Buddy and there’s a part of me that has joked about making a physical version of it, but the material is so rare. I’d love to get some junk films and play around with them though. 

Ask Any Buddy also extends into a podcast where you covered and contextualized the films featured in your project. I was wondering what prompted that. 

I would say the impetus for the original podcast was because we wanted a way to build some hype for it while we were taking a break from doing festival screenings. It was just impossible to get press, especially during [the height of] COVID, where none of the festivals were happening in person and it was hard to present what the film was to people properly. It was all about how to explain what it is, and it ties into why I’ve always been fascinated by the films: they weren’t made in a vacuum. They very much reflect what was going on in gay culture at the time they were made, even if they are presenting this kind of warped fantasy world where everything is gay and happy and fun.

The fun thing about the podcast was that it had the raunchy sex talk and all that, but it was a deep dive into talking about the Mark IV slave auction raid and how that ties in with this one movie, or how Honorable Jones Comes Out was actually inspired by a real case in which a mayor’s deputy was caught at a gay porn theater. There’s all these weird little blips of history that find their way into these movies and extricating that from the actual film and blowing them up is really fun. These filmmakers were really putting themselves at risk making these movies and, like I said, they weren’t made in a vacuum; they were advertised in mainstream gay publications. 

If you look at early issues of The Advocate, a lot of their front covers are photos taken from the gay porn movies [of the era]. They reviewed the films and had interviews with the actors and directors. It was a big thing! But over the years they were kind of swept under the rug due to respectability politics and the AIDS epidemic, and a lot of that stuff has been kind of forgotten about because they were seen as disreputable or ephemeral. And I think there’s really something there and it’s been cool to help get this stuff back out there and to see that people see why I find them interesting too. 

After Ask Any Buddy, you pivoted the podcast over to Cruising the Movies, which directly ties into a series you’re programming at IFC Center. It always feels like everything you do is about making sure people get their eyes on these works – is that the general ethos behind it? 

I think part of it was just feeling exhausted with gay porn films. I love working in that milieu, I love that world, I love those films, and I love those people, but after doing it for five years, it gets kind of same-y. How many different ways can I describe a blowjob? But sometimes I would also get unsolicited dirty messages from people about their past experiences with the films and that made me uncomfortable, especially post-transition. 

How do you even reply to that?

I don’t think it’s me being a prude either. It’s just kind of trying to reassert the fact that I’m a trans woman and I don’t want to be boxed into a little corner. I don’t want to be seen as the person who can only do gay porn because I can do a lot. Cruising the Movies, both the podcast and the screening series at IFC Center, is this fun way of opening that up and expanding off the work I’ve been doing in Austin that I still do remotely. And the funny thing about Cruising the Movies is that we initially emphasized it wasn’t a porn series at all, but every single film that we’ve shown so far has had either unsimulated sex, or is some kind of sexploitation film, or has some sort of sexual element to it. Even if it’s She-Man: A Story of Fixation [directed by Bob Clark] – I’m not sure there’s someone getting off to that movie, but it is still a “sex” film. 

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I think I can definitely imagine someone getting off on Dominita [a dominatrix played by Dorian Wayne] and her plot line [in which she force-femmes and blackmails a man]. 

Or with something like Glen or Glenda, which was a film made for this kind of early exploitation roadshow circuit so, yeah, there’s burlesque sequences that are cut into the middle of the film. [CTM] isn’t really a porn series, or a gay series, it’s just kind of a queer, vaguely sex series, but not really. 

How does it feel to be introducing people to films that they might not have experienced before? At screenings you host, what is the general reaction to your choices? 

I think the reaction I get is usually pretty positive. Programming and distribution are really my passion. I love history, I love archiving, I love all this stuff I’ve done. But, for me, programming and distribution and marketing and getting the films on screen and the audiences out to watch them is what I live for in a lot of different ways. And to be working steadily as an independent programmer, doing a minimum of six or seven shows in two cities every single month, and having them consistently be successful and get good reactions, is kind of remarkable. 

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It’s all changed since moving to New York, too. In Austin, I was largely doing queer programming at the Austin Film Society and that was scary because it seemed like every time I would book something, the context for the screening would completely change by the time the screening happened. I programmed Wigstock: The Movie as a fun end-of-summer movie and then literally two weeks before the screening is when the Texas drag ban was introduced. So suddenly it’s like, “Here’s a different context for this.” 

I’d say the screenings I’m proudest of were when I showed Rosa von Praunheim’s Transexual Menace in 2022 as a tie-in with Trans Day of Remembrance. And we had this first screening that was really good, with lots of trans people in the audience (which was always hard to do in Austin) and a great reaction. The energy was really positive, but then the drag show shooting happened in Denver that very night, and I had my second screening of the movie the day after. So I had to come back with a completely different tone. What was passionate and upbeat became very somber. I was scared to intro it that night, it was hard for me to talk about, but, at the same time, trans people were coming back with their parents for that second screening and I never would have expected what happened. 

That’s true community building, isn’t it? 

And, if you haven’t seen the film, Transexual Menace is not a “Trans 101” documentary; it’s like “true heads only” for real. I think it’s the greatest trans documentary ever made, but it’s also not a “here’s a movie to show my parents” kind of thing, but the fact that people were doing it anyway, having already seen it, and trusted me in that capacity, was really profound. 

Do you take pride in being part of whatever history these films might have in the long haul, not just in screening them but contextualizing them or giving them new life?

One thing about me—that I don’t think all programmers or historians necessarily do—is that I try to be very aware and conscious of the distribution and screening histories of these films. The way I’ve heard about a lot of these titles is through grunt work; going through old queer film festival programs or old issues of The Advocate and Variety, or all these other trade publications and film calendars. I know that I’m not the first person to show these films, because they’ve had a release before. People know them or knew them at one point.

These histories are a very important thing to me, and I hate the word “discovery.” I never want to say that I “discovered” something. I didn’t find the print, I was just a person who knew what it was. It’s something I really try to underline in my work: I’m not the first person doing this stuff, but I am aware of the past and trying to build upon it, and also trying to rectify some of the wrongs that have been done in the past with these films that weren’t received the way they probably should have been. 

Which I think is a fairly modest take, because you are the reason these works are being “discovered” on some level. I’m curious how much work goes into sharing this knowledge and research, especially when it comes to both home video releases or just in-person intros. 

My approach to intro-ing a film is preparing as much as I can and then coming up with a couple of jokes. Whatever comes out on stage is what comes out, they’re kind of out of pocket in a way. But the reason why I really enjoy doing home video work is because it’s an excuse to really drill down deep with the research and find out everything I possibly can about a movie, or filmmaker, or a scene or actor, or some sort of cultural moment. There was one commentary I did fairly recently—I can’t say what it’s for—that involved me doing a deep dive into the history of the showgirl billboard that’s in Myra Breckinridge on the Sunset Strip, and all for a very trivial little detail.

I know there are a lot of home video people who are all about analyzing a film for its themes, and doing these very academic readings, but I see myself as more of a compiler of information. It’s about packaging and delivering that information. It’s about saying, “Here’s the story of this film.” 

I love those films, and I love those people, but after doing it for five years, it gets kind of same-y. How many different ways can I describe a blowjob?

Elizabeth Purchell

How does that tie into producing home videos with other collaborators, especially when it comes to selecting, and almost programming, people who would suit the material best? 

It’s a combination of different things: on one hand, it’s “who do I know who likes the film and would have something to say about it” but also, something that I try to make a point of doing is bringing in more new people. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but I think a lot of home video companies rely on the same stable of historians and academics and critics. And all those people are wonderful, but I think there are more perspectives for these films out there, and I think especially when you’re talking about a film that has trans or queer characters, or stories, or is by a trans filmmaker, you should have a trans person on it.

I think the struggle with home video, especially working in it, is that the margins are very thin so there’s not a lot of pay. The deadlines are very tight and it’s hard work. But at the same time, I love doing it because of the people. The reason why I do all this stuff is because I like working with people who are in this world. It’s fun for me. 

To jump back to another film you’re responsible for bringing to the people: what about Sex Demon? It’s a film that was lost for decades, and now there’s a blu-ray release thanks to you and AGFA. What’s it like not only playing a hand in ensuring that film has a lasting legacy and what makes the films you paired it with on the release [Deadly Blows and 10:30PM Monday] special in their own way? 

The thing that makes Sex Demon so special is that it’s good. I have helped find a number of “lost” gay films over the years and I think the recurring thing is that you spend all this time trying to find a movie and then you finally get it and it’s just whatever. But Sex Demon was really special—both the experience of getting the print and then watching it for the first time. I connected with this filmmaker who lives in Astoria through Facebook, because he had listed a gay porn film on a 16mm collectors group. I initially missed out on it, so I asked if he had any more. So he sent me a whole list and Sex Demon immediately jumped out to me, along with a bunch of others, because this stuff is impossible to find. 

I was already planning on going to New York the following week to do a screening at Light Industry, so we made a deal to meet up for me to buy everything. Ed Halter from Light Industry and Joe Rubin from Vinegar Syndrome went with me and we took all this film back from Queens to Light Industry, with all these loose reels packed into milk crates. And the first thing we did was throw Sex Demon on the projector to see if it was any good.

It’s one of my favorite moviegoing experiences, being literally one of the first people watching this movie in forty years and having this experience of it being good and not knowing if we have the full movie or not. Getting near the end, the reel was looking very very empty and we were like, “Wait, does it have it all?” The collective sigh of relief we all had when it ended with the exact ending is very memorable to me. 

I knew what had happened in the movie because it had been reviewed a couple of times in the 70s, like in Variety, which is crazy. Not to go too off-topic, but the crazy thing is that Sex Demon is a rip-off of The Exorcist, and Addison Verrill was Variety’s porn critic who reviewed the film. He was later murdered by Paul Bateson, who had a bit part in The Exorcist, and then that is what inspired William Friedkin to make Cruising. So the guy who reviewed a gay porn horror movie for Variety was killed by the guy from The Exorcist, which then led the director of The Exorcist to make a gay porn horror movie. 

That’s so insane, but that’s such an interesting piece of lore around a movie that you otherwise would never hear about regularly. And it just goes to show you how much pornography was tied into the mainstream. 

When I first saw the Variety review and the initials of the reviewer, my jaw literally dropped. But Sex Demon is something I’m very proud of because it was something I really had to fight for. It’s hard to program adult films and the fact that we were able to play it in over two dozen cities and it sold out or did well everywhere it played is amazing. 

What about the other two films on there? 

They were in a storage unit outside of San Francisco that I helped find. I was in the habit of searching Craigslist in various cities for films, posters, or magazines, and that came up. Vinegar Syndrome acquired that whole collection and it turned out to actually be the missing half of another collection that they had acquired from Dr. Ted McIlvenna, who was the co-founder of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS), which is a cool other rabbit hole to go through. There were these two ministers who hit on this idea in the late 60s that the way you teach young people about sex is through experimental film. And so they commissioned all of these experimental filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, Constance Beeson and James Broughton to make sex films they could use as educational tools. 

That’s so wild. 

So the films were part of that collection. And I don’t think 10:30PM Monday is necessarily a horror film, but it fit – 

Yeah, the film is arguably really beautiful. The first half is so tender and engrossing and then the back half is so abrasive with how it presents f*cking. And the double fisting! 

I always describe the film as what you’d get when a group of aging leathermen try to make an experimental thing, and the main thing about it is that it’s literally a rip-off of [Wakefield Poole’s] Bijou. 

I think especially when you’re talking about a film that has trans or queer characters, or stories, or is by a trans filmmaker, you should have a trans person on it.

Elizabeth Purchell

And then there’s Deadly Blows, which I don’t know if it’d call “good” but it does lure you in as an experiment: how much can a film with bad sex scenes be livened up by its score alone? 

I talk about it in the commentary, but in the earliest days of gay hardcore in Los Angeles, this theater owner and producer had this studio that he ran where these filmmakers were tasked with making a complete film every single week. They would be writing and casting and planning production on Monday, and at the same time, finishing up the film from the previous week. Then that weekend they would shoot, and then continue editing and finishing it. They’d do this week after week, and, with Deadly Blows, they wanted to experiment with tungsten film. They were trying to shoot with no artificial light and that’s why they got a house with these gigantic windows. The fact that it ended up being this weird gay horror thing was kind of incidental, because when you’re making a film every week, you have to keep coming up with ideas and making it interesting for yourself. It’s about doing a different genre, experimenting with film, trying to learn a new technique; and Deadly Blows is such a fascinating example of that.

Even down to these stories about discovering films, everything seems to come back to collaboration. I can’t help but think about the fact that you’ve screened works at practically every cinema. I mean, how many in New York alone at this point? 

I do the weekly Weird Wednesday series at Alamo in Brooklyn, I do the monthly Cruising the Movies series at IFC Center, and I’ve also done stuff at Nitehawk Prospect Park and Williamsburg, Light Industry, Roxy Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, and Spectacle, where I volunteer. I’ve also done Q&As for BAM and online stuff for Metrograph. 

But that alone is a ton and I can relate to it in my own bouncing around of venues and audiences as a programmer in South Florida. It shows an interest in collaboration and showcasing the work wherever you can. Does that even tie into archiving and finding these treasures you want to share with the world? 

I think I have this relentless drive to get this stuff out there, especially because one of my main programming ethos is that I look to see what other people are doing and what they aren’t doing, and then try to do what they’re not doing. I see these gaps in the programming that’s happening all over the place and it’s knowing that if no one else is going to do it, then it’s not going to happen, so I need to do it. 

I also think part of the fun of programming is tailoring programs to different venues. The audience at Metrograph is different from Alamo, the audience at Light Industry is different from IFC Center – it’s about having ideas that will work in different contexts. And part of it is also trying to build up an adventurous audience that will follow you wherever you go, or trust you with these things. At Alamo, I’ve sometimes worried that I’ve gone too far by showing really edgy stuff like Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper, Frank Henenlotter’s Bad Biology, or Doris Wishman’s Dildo Heaven, but those shows have been among the very best I’ve ever had there. All three of those sold out well in advance and got great reactions, so it’s been rewarding to have these intuitions pay off. 

I actually think the thing that will be my life’s work is showing Pumping Iron II: The Women. I showed it twice in Austin, showed it once in Brooklyn, and then we showed it at Frameline in San Francisco. And I’m planning to bring it back to Brooklyn and hopefully Los Angeles later this year. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made and it tore the roof off! ♦

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