The Brooklyn Rail

On June 18, Anthology Film Archives will present Horny Shorts for Intellectual Perverts, an expansive and seductive program curated by Angelo Madsen for Folsom Street East, the longest-running and largest kink and fetish festival on the East Coast. Bringing together five short films produced between 2024 and 2026, the program entwines personal and shared memory, thrusting figures of a queer countercultural milieu into sharp relief. Across an intricate tableaux of piss, pain, and the restless pursuit of pleasure, these works indulge in foregrounding the frictions between embodied excess and theoretical praxis, reframing desire as a political and ontological question, asking how it might be reworked toward collective ends.

If Horny Shorts assembles a visual commons of deviance, Kay Gabriel’s recently published book Perverts offers its poetic analogue. A depraved, debonair mirage of our times, Perverts is self-reflexive: This is “an epic poem stitched together from the dreams of / friends or strangers, delegates / of the dream assembly // who writes an epic poem in the 2020s? Perverts.” Here, artists, academics, sex workers, starlets, and organizers fantasize about sex change, STI treatment, love, and liberatory revolution.

In Gabriel’s communal vision, the pervert operates as an elastic social technology that binds a shifting collective through irony and antagonism; there is an obligation involved, not as simple (or as cheap) as reclaiming a slur. Horny Shorts shares this sentiment, a cinematic corollary gathering images into a charged field where perversion becomes the connective tissue between private fantasy and public form.

“There is no such thing as a neutral body,” says Liz Rosenfeld, Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and subject of Lily Baldwin’s mesmeric experimental documentary portrait Ecstasie, the program’s standout. “My fat, my flesh—I think of it as something material,” Rosenfeld continues in a direct-to-camera address, their voice caressing close-ups of bare back, chest, and arms bathed in cool, sun-drenched light. The intrigue of Rosenfeld’s bodily assemblages lies less in their final form than in watching them morph and manipulate their figure in concert with the camera—crouching, rolling, writhing, and shaking towards ecstatic rupture. As a dancer who has performed with Trisha Brown, David Byrne, and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Baldwin brings a choreographic sensitivity to the collaboration. Invoking Simone Weil’s notion that “the highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest,” the film locates rapture in sustained, reciprocal looking—unfurling the negotiations of spectatorship with a porous intimacy that investigates how that ecstasy travels through the body. What emerges is a cathartic inquiry into the thresholds between performance and collaboration. In this present moment, as encroaching neo-fascistic movements mobilize pernicious, erotically-charged propaganda against bodies deemed non-normative, Ecstasie lands with galvanizing force.

Offering the program a full load of filth, meanwhile, is filmmaker and former BUTT magazine editor Adam Baran’s skanky, scuzzy, emphatically NSFW music video for Klovis Gaynor and the Urinal Cakes’s single Mysophiliac—a title that fuses the Greek mýsos (defilement) with the suffix -philia (love). At the center of this manifesto of Dionysian degradation is glam-grotesque oracle Christeene (collaborator of such artistic arbiters as Peaches, Rick Owens, and Kembra Pfahler) whose feral charisma and unabashed stank transform her into a kinky conduit of confessional unbosoming while strung-out debauchee Gaynor presides over a delirium of gleaming Prince Alberts in a constant state of tumescence. The video plays like a John Waters-esque fever dream—an onslaught of lurid iconography that would feel equally at home flickering endlessly in the red room next to the trough at Singers as it does detonating across Anthology’s sanctified screen.

Of a similarly camp variety, Plenum Im Tuntenhaus is a narrative drama that follows a motley crew of pink-haired, pup-masked queers organizing at Berlin’s historic alternative housing project to resist the sanitization of a gay cruising ground at the Neukölln-Kreuzberg border. A call to arms for such spaces, the film is nonetheless flattened by drab procedural detail and heavy-handed satire. Its conceit feels attenuated in a present in which cruising is already spatially and digitally mediated through apps like Sniffies and Grindr and within a modern landscape where such locales are less endangered than they are transformed and proliferating, ultimately leaving it as neither a compelling historical account nor effective contemporary agitprop.

Both Angelo Madsen’s Idexa, 1992 and Sam Ashby’s Sanctuary take a different approach, deploying talking-head style interviews that allow their documentary’s subjects to articulate philosophical worldviews rooted in erotic practice. As in Madsen’s acclaimed festival-favorite A Body To Live In, Idexa, 1992 traces the life and work of a singular cultural figure: Idexa Stern, an academic/self-taught tattoo artist who moved from Germany in 1991 to study with Angela Davis before embedding herself in San Francisco’s underground dyke play-party scene and opening the city’s first woman-owned tattoo shop. The film mines oral history through present-day interviews, set against a split screen of 16 mm portraiture and archival VHS footage documenting Stern’s first hook suspension experience in 1992.

Sanctuary, in turn, reconstructs a queer spiritual community founded in the 1970s by Peter Christopher Purusha Androgyne Larkin, a onetime director turned monk and mystic. His book, The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha, advanced cosmic-erotic consciousness through then-nascent kink and fetish practices (namely anal fisting) as a means of shattering repressive gender binaries. Shot on 16 mm, the film entwines the voices of Parusha’s friends and followers. Less a portrait than a speculative study of unrealized utopian potential, the film gains force from its present-day grounding, sidestepping both nostalgic mythmaking about pre-AIDS idealism and any easy reconciliation with the limits of Purusha’s pre–queer-theory ideology.

Across the program, perversion appears as a shifting relation between forms of collectivity and the conditions under which that category mutates. If the last remaining taboo is a complex of love and care—for one another, for the world, and for a liberatory future—then the perverts are unusually adept at it. It’s worth remembering what Rosa von Praunheim’s insurrectionist provocation insists: “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives.”