monotone: What is Gay24 and Why did you start it? 

Sam: Gay24 is primarily a film club. It runs out of Flippys in Brunswick. It’s free to attend, and we try to make it as accessible as possible. We provide subtitles for everything as best we can. The focus of the programming is on unseen and radically queer film in particular. 

There is something about watching those kind of films in community that is really powerful. I do say sometimes the films are kind of an excuse to get people in a room and talking. Like, that is THE point, really. The films are kind of prompts. 

monotone: It opens the conversation. It’s like an exercise. People love an event. 

So how did it actually begin, and how have you found the progress and change over time? 

Sam: So Jini (who has stepped away from Gay24 in the recent year or so) and I started it together. We were living together at the time [as roommates], and we first did it in this apartment in Carlton. We didn’t have a lounge room, because we were too poor to have a lounge room, that was my bedroom. 

monotone: I (Ahlia) mean, who can afford a lounge room these days? 

Sam: Yeah, exactly. This was around the time that Dressed in Blue (Antonio Giménez Rico, 1983) had been restored and was being seen by a wide audience for really the first time. There had been a tiny run when it first came out. I saw it, and saw that it was doing its screenings around the US. I thought “Oh I hope it plays in Australia”. Then they announced a Bluray, so I got a release of it. I really wanted to watch it with other trans people. It felt really important. 

Because we didn’t have a lounge room, we booked out the cinema at the back of [the bar] Longplay. So that was the initial impetus for the idea. We ended up thinking - well, if we’re going to do this, we should play a short with it. We initially did one in early December, then Dressed in Blue in January. 

monotone: Did you two draw on Jini’s curatorial background to structure the way you’d screen the film? Did the screening series feel as formalised or precise as it’s evolved into? 

Sam: Definitely not, hahaha. Both of those first two screenings were called “Sam and Jini Screen Gay Films for Their Mates”

monotone: But you do yourself a disservice by saying you weren’t, from the jump, seeing what else you could find, or what else is interesting. 

Sam: Well, yes, there was definitely a desire to explore. The programming skills have definitely developed over time, but yes, there was always an idea of exploring “what these films say to each other.”

The film we screened with Dressed in Blue was the New Zealand short Jewel’s Darl (Peter Wells, 1986), and the two films let us talk about trans histories in our own backyard, and start to trace those paths: Where do we come from, what were we doing in time/place? Can we start to, in a communal way, trace these histories and recognise ourselves? 

monotone: Right, and so having the pairing, lends itself to a comparative exercise. 

Sam: Yeah, exactly - once you’ve started doing that you’re addicted. It is like suddenly finding a new way to make art. Putting these [films] in conversation with one another really does make them more than the sum of their parts. There is something so satisfying about it. 

monotone: So from the very start you and Jini thought the way that these screenings would foster a communal space would be great, but you also found that that generation of dialogue, discussion, discourse that was happening in that space was rich from the very beginning. 

Sam: The potential of it, absolutely. Over time that was something we really started actively chasing. It became a focus. We would find a film, and then ask, what happens if we put it beside here, or I’ve seen this short that might suit, or this feature from this country, etc. 

monotone: We imagine so much of the cinema you were looking at and finding, trans cinema, has really been off-grid, or completely unseen. Like a lot of trans history, just avoided. 

Sam: Yes, very much so. In some situations, very deliberately, in other situations it was just because the people making it were doing so outside the system that provides frameworks for keeping things known and in distribution. 

monotone: There’s been a really significant uptick of cinema screenings, cinema clubs, here in Naarm, but also worldwide, especially in places like New York. In our minds Gay24 was one of the pioneers of this new cinephilic movement. Why do you think there’s been an interest in this kind of engagement in cinema?

Sam: I think the obvious answer is people crave being in a space with each other. I know I do! I’ll speak to what I recognise and see - we get a lot of young people coming to screenings. At MIFF [Melbourne International Film Festival] the crowds were overwhelmingly young. Just incredible - nearly every screening I went to was sold out, or very close to, and filled with kids in their late teens or early 20s. In a way that was just so exciting.

monotone: We wonder if part of it is explained by the fact that the younger generations are drinking less and less, and their social culture is less intertwined with substances. They’re searching for a community aspect outside of that framework. There’s also so much slop media online, so they’re going out and looking for a place where they can actually see something good. 

monotone: Broadly speaking, we're [monotone, Sam] all roughly the same age. There was a certain generational specificity to our age that part of your identity was based around your own curatorial sensibility. In a generalising way, it seems the younger generations seem to want someone else doing it who knows their stuff. 

Sam: Exactly. There is a real desire for curation now. I get it, because the landscape is overwhelming. I don’t watch streaming, and so on, but when I go to my parent’s house, I think to myself this is insane. There’s just no curation, there’s just…stuff. 

monotone: Young people are a lot more politically engaged too, and a lot of these services also aren’t aligned in any meaningful way with them. 

Sam: Yeah. If there is something positive to be taken from social media, there does seem to be a push using it as a way to connect. A lot of the interest we got early on for Gay24 was from people who didn’t even live in Naarm wanting to follow us and ask about what we were doing. Even if the history is out there in archives and websites, having a space where someone every month is having a discussion about something, and here some examples of what we’re talking about this month via social media, is a really valuable thing, even if you can’t make it in person.

monotone: Gay24 has been running for quite some time now. How have you felt it has moved? How have you observed the growth and change? 

Sam: We’ve started doing some more screenings in other spaces, and a bunch of people have asked if it’s because Flippy’s fills up. We so often have situations with people sitting on the floor, or pushed up. The fact that people are sitting on each other’s feet, happy to talk to each other - happy to ask to squeeze next to someone - that’s the point. Doing the screenings in a traditional cinema space doesn't allow that dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, I love going to the movies. The point with something like Gay24 is the stepping on people’s feet. It’s the cigarette break between the two films. It's comforting someone you've never met who's crying because of what they’re seeing on the screen. I think no traditional screening spaces facilitate that really. 

monotone: Much of what you screen at Gay24 has been older, often lesser-seen, or from the ‘archives’. You’ve recently also been able to show contemporary and new releases - how has that process been, and was it a very different curatorial process for you? 

Sam: In the beginning most of the stuff we were screening was 90% archival stuff. That’s still kind of the case for the film club. It’s rare that we screen anything accessible and new. But we’ve started doing these, almost like, side screenings in addition to the club. They’re ticketed, so that we can actually give the (contemporary) filmmakers some money, and we can take a little bit for the running costs. 

That has been just incredible. I’m so excited doing that. The first time we started doing that was when we worked with TILDE, a trans film festival here [in Naarm]. They approached us and asked us to curate a night. We showed Henry Handsome’s Dog Movie (2023). We’d already been in contact in Henry, and then this opportunity presented itself. And so it was like Oh sick!

monotone: So you had a sort of institutional backing.

Sam: Exactly, and we were insulated from having to do all the money stuff, which was a great way to start. We got to say, this festival is going to pay you, and we’re going to write it up and organise it. 

That was incredible, because it was an opportunity to talk and work with a contemporary filmmaker that is doing work in this new wave of trans filmmaking that has come up in the past couple of years. It was really cool to see someone like Henry really making something completely different - this guy is making a zero budget film that is really, explicitly, for a trans audience. Its jokes are only funny if you’ve lived in a certain kind of share house. It was just so exciting, and it’s also been so exciting to see that he was just at the beginning of this wider movement [of trans cinema]. 

monotone: Castration Movie (Louise Weard, 2024) being a bit of a breakout from that group.

Sam: Totally, Louise’s stuff, or Divine Hammer (Mae M., Hazel M., 2025) which we screened at TILDE this year. There’s this real groundswell of trans people making films with small or zero budgets, distributing it themselves or with friends, and then finding an audience online. All of the kind of rules you would have for “film distribution” are just not true. They’re putting films up online before they’re played at festivals. There is this strong desire for the films to get seen. People get more excited when it’s accessible. People are going to want to pay to see it in a room with other people, because that’s its own beautiful experience. 

monotone: Queer representation, queer characters, are way more mainstream than they were 5-10 years. Even something like the latest Araki film selling out instantaneously at MIFF speaks to a new thirst it seems for more boundary pushing, more exciting queer media. 

Do you find any intersection of this popular queer representation with the kind of work you do? Do you see a bleed from a slightly more populist sensibility, or does it still feel quite radical in its capacity? 

Sam: I mean, a bit of both. Like any kind of underground movement, people who are clued into it and happen to have the resources are bringing it in. Louise [Weard] is in the new Jane Schoenbrun movie, for example. I think more of that will just start happening more. To look at Araki as you mentioned, he’s a good example of a filmmaker where a bunch of Gen Z people learnt about his films from TikTok. 

monotone: When he made Doom Generation in 1995 he wasn’t thinking it was going to get cut into 5 second edits and discovered there. 

Sam: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun is a trans filmmaker taking and dealing with all the muck and the grizzly bits of trans shame and ecstasy, and then taking that, almost laundering it, in a way that is palatable to a much wider audience. 

Look, I’m not a filmmaker, but my understanding is to get funding, especially in Australia, for queer content, you have to package it in a certain way. You can’t really make it for a queer audience, or, at least, you have to make it for a straight audience’s idea of what a queer audience is. I think within that it is possible to sneak in, to launder something, actually interesting. 

monotone: It’s been a long time since you decided on the name, and merch. I’m (Alexander) proud to say the Gay24 hat I have has been featured in multiple hinge profiles for my various friends. A24, the distribution company you were gleefully parodying once one was this charmingly quirky indie upstart, but over time and with loads of venture capital funding has become more murky in its sensibility and politics. 

Can independent collectives ever really grow and reach the mainstream without capitulating a bit? 

Sam: It really depends on how you define success. I think it’s possible to have success. I’m not sure it’s possible to get rich.

monotone: From the lounge room to the mansion- 

[Laughs]

Sam: Is it possible to hold onto this underground sensibility? I do think so. People like Louise Weard, or Alice Maio Mackay, or what Elizabeth Purchell is doing with Muscle Distribution are good examples. I think they’re all incredibly successful at what they set out to do. Jane Schoenbrun is probably our best example of someone who has extreme success. But they also are constantly talking about a fucking nightmare that is - They were supposed to be doing an adaptation of Nevada (Nevada: A Novel, from author Imogen Binnie) and that fell apart because they were having too many disagreements with cis people who wouldn’t make the film! 

Sam: I also think when you define success by your own terms, when what you’re setting out to do is bring people together and make art - to connect with people. 

monotone: Then you can quite comfortably say you succeeded. 

Sam: On the name - we were drunk, and we thought what was the funniest thing we could come up with. I had photoshop open, and we had the A24 logo up and were just cackling over the laptop. 

monotone: That really speaks to everything - the recombination and recontextualization and the taking back and the reclamation of culture.

What do you imagine the length and legs of the Gay24 project going forward? 

Sam: We currently have a hand in the archives, and another in bringing this international underground network of queer filmmakers to Naarm. I would like to extend both of those. There have been discussions of bringing more filmmakers out, doing festivals, that kind of stuff. 

There’s archival work too that we’re looking at. Getting films into a screenable state that aren’t currently - whether that because the physical object hasn’t been cleaned up and digitised, or because the rights need to be figured out and cleared. There are films we have access to, that are really incredible, and they might exist only as one copy in an archive. Getting these screenable not just for our audience, but for a worldwide audience would be great. 

It’s about looking further and deeper back, and further and deeper forward. 

monotone: With the looking back, you clearly don’t feel you’ve hit the end of the rabbit hole. There’s an endless sea of stuff to discover. 

Sam: Especially here (in this country). There are so many short films and projects that have captured really important parts of Australia’s queer histories that people made as student films, or screened in one film festival. There is this entropy, and I’d love to make an effort to archive everything before that’s not possible anymore.

To catch an event by Gay24 follow @gay24films