Southern for Pussy
Zackary Druck and Penny Sori in Southern for Pussy.
Southern for Pussy (2015)
Created directed by: Zackary Drucker
Written by: Zackary Drucker and Penny Sori
In 2014, while Zackary was in town filming a pilot for an transwomen-led talk show, The Skew, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, I hosted the five panelists the night for the MCA event so they could warm up and for Zackary to see what the women wanted to talk about. I cooked my traditional menu at the time: curry and lemon chicken, roasted eggplant in tomato sauce over Porcini tortelloni, steamed veggies (kale, broccoli, cauliflower), roasted eggplant, avocados. It was an honor to host these iconic women, including: Van Barnes, Precious Brady-Davis, Jen Richards and Angelica Ross.
At dinner I mentioned I was producing for the new OTV project, and Zackary pitched a short based on a real conversation with her mother, Penny Sori, about her vagina. The story queers the mother-daughter relationship by flipping standard TV tropes with short, subtle bursts of queer culture. For the most part, the plot is ordinary; casual conversation before Zackary’s character goes on a date. “Transness is incidental,” Zackary says of the plot, but it is still present.
Months later I was in Zackary’s mother Penny Sori’s house in Los Angeles producing Southern for Pussy with cinematographer Michelle Lawler, production designer Liz Toonkel, and a number of artistic collaborators supplying original artwork (see below).
Releasing Southern for Pussy in person and online was a powerful lesson in what is possible in intimate community spaces and mainstream online spaces. Held for an audience of 25 people in the Uptown office of TransTech Social Enterprises, a social service agency for trans people, Southern for Pussy ’s premiere included screenings of two earlier works of video art that normally circulate in galleries and museums, Lost Lake (2010) and She Gone Rogue (2012), and a postscreening Q&A via Skype. Despite the small number of people in attendance, there were key people in the room. This included Claire Ruud, director of curatorial strategy at MCA Chicago, art historian Lauren DeLand, Honey Pot’s Felicia Holman, Drs. Rashayla Marie Brown and Nicole Morse, and Theo Germaine, who would go on to star in two OTV projects before transitioning to Hollywood and star in Abby McEnany’s Work in Progress (Showtime), Ryan Murphy’s The Politician (Netflix) and Jules Rosskam’s feature Desire Lines.
The discussion centered around contemporary tensions concerning contemporary trans visibility, Zackary ’s work as an artist, and the importance of remembering older generations of transwomen and ciswomen. There were striking moments of laughter during all three of Drucker’s pieces that were shown, and I think there was such amount of laughter because the crowd was largely queer and familiar with queer performance. The congenial atmosphere was due in part to our location at TransTech’s formally queer space, and also due to Drucker’s own charming personality on- and off-screen. During the Q&A, the audience was really taken by her processing of working with her parents, and her mother in particular. Other questions were about Drucker’s experiences of scripting versus improvising, and working on Transparent. In all, the Q&A shed light on the broader communities in which Drucker continues to be enmeshed with—which I think was productive for the audience, and advances OpenTV’s larger business/collaborative/media model.
Online, Southern for Pussy ended up becoming one of OTV’s most successful films, with tens of thousands of plays. The vast majority of those plays came from Buzzfeed, where writer Meredith Talusan (founding editor of Condé Nast’s queer pub them) covered the film’s exhibition at traveling show about queer & trans art at Cooper Union. Because OTV was uploading to Vimeo at the time, the film was embeddable, greatly expanding the reach of video art typically confined to the gallery. Sadly, the only comment on the post is a transphobic rant about bathrooms, showing how these mainstream online spaces are not often welcoming to people across the gender spectrum. But the online popularity of Southern for Pussy still showed the power of having trans writers covering trans art!
Watch Southern for Pussy on OTV!
This post includes additional writing from Dr. Kemi Adeyemi, who attended the Southern for Pussy premiere.