![]() ![]() “Shakedown was consistently inconsistent. It’s like: ‘I wear a shirt and pants, and I have a hard dick, that’s my package.’ But women are so many things, and any one of those things could mean you’re not gonna have sex. I feel like gay guys got having anonymous sex down pat, and a lot of that has to do with streamlining your personality. ![]() It’s not gonna take the same road as gay guys. This whole world of women being gay is actually really undiscovered. And in this place, in the interviews in the film, it was just consistently random. Where you start to think in terms of right and wrong ways to talk about gender. When does an expansive practice become dogmatic? It’s at the point where it’s regulated. If you feel a new way you have a new word for it. The way to be radical is to leave people space to be consistently random. It was absolutely talked about, it was something people were inventing variations on all the time, but it was laid back. “What I liked about Shakedown was that the way people related to gender performance was consistently random. Weinraub’s film skims the surface of this multiplicity with the grace of a lap dance, both inviting and disciplining the viewer’s desire. Like all scenes, the one around Shakedown was full of a multitude of relationships and antagonisms that a single documentary could never fully depict. ![]() It’s a dreamy glimpse into a scene subjected to outrageous pressures - from the spectral cop of homophobia and even more from the real cops - that was a wellspring of fun, love, desire and good times regardless. The movie evades easy categorization, both because of the underground nature of the scene and because of Weinraub’s protective relation to her subjects, who she describes as her stars. A hazy portrayal of a social scene, of sex and money, the film follows figures such as Egypt and Jazmine, beloved performers at the club, and Ronnie-Ron, Shakedown’s creator, up until the club night was shut down by the LAPD. Leilah Weinraub’s documentary feature Shakedown is named after the black lesbian strip club night in Los Angeles where Weinraub worked as a “video lady” in the early 2000s, in her early 20s. Taken from the summer 2018 issue of Dazed. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |