Beyond Queer: Voices from Bohemia

Former Warhol Superstar and creator of the seminal sexual politics performance spectacular Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, Penny Arcade washed up on the shores of the Lower East Side of New York as a teenager in 1967. After decades in the Downtown art world, Penny’s personal relationships with dozens of outrageous characters, from the world famous to the fascinatingly obscure, led to the creation of the Lower East Side Biography Project, an oral history of New York’s Bohemian culture from the ’50s to the present, broadcast weekly on Manhattan Cable Television for 20 years.

Beyond Queer is a feature documentary created from these television interviews and features iconic raconteur Quentin Crisp, film star & poet Taylor Mead, feminist artist & sex educator Betty Dodson, film maker & choreographer Jack Waters, novelist & playwright Sarah Schulman, Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn, transgendered punk rock legend Jayne County, novelist & political commentator Gary Indiana, experimental theater visionary John Vaccaro, and actor & painter Robert Beers describe their experience of New York’s recent cultural golden age and recount a half-century of radically shifting social perceptions of sexual identity – in Bohemia, in the arts, and in the marketplace. Keepers of countercultural wisdom, these authentic underground characters hail from generations that enriched the artistic and cultural life of an entire nation. Today much of their world has passed into history, but lessons of their colorful experience remain, to educate and inspire us.

Interviews are interspersed with cutting edge performance excerpts of Arcade, an inventor of performance art and one of the most outspoken political voices in the American art world. Also presented are rarely seen excerpts from the seminal experimental film that influenced the Warhol generation of film makers: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962).