Penis Poetry

Katie Couric travels across the U.S. to talk with scientists, psychologists, activists, authors and families about the complex issue of gender.

It is late 2004, and 34-year-old Englishman Alistair Appleton is about to fly from London to the Brazilian coast, where he will drink ayahuasca for the first time. With wit, insight, and sensitivity, Alistair shares this experience with us, and chats with some fellow participants before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. For the past few years, Alistair had been working as a television presenter. In 2000, he started making trips to the Centre for World Peace and Health in Scotland to learn how to meditate. When clinical psychologist Silvia Polivoy opened an ayahuasca healing center in Bahia in 2004, Alistair faced his fears and seized the opportunity to attend.

Spotlighting the art of drag, and centered on the New York staple Wigstock, this documentary showcases the personalities and performances that inform the ways we understand queerness, art and identity today.

Bernhard, an actress-comedienne whose brassy humor attracts a cult-like following, here offers a semiconfessional view of her life's landscape. Childhood memories of her father, a doctor, and her mother, an artist, are warmly rendered in scenes of the Jewish family amiably accommodating itself to the Christmas season, and of the obligatory communal vacations joined by colorful relatives. The abrupt transition to a flamboyant denizen of "downtowns," Los Angeles or New York, to an existence as a character in the lives of marginal people, is evoked in sharply satirical terms, in a melange of humorous fact and fiction, monologues akin to those that make Bernhard an icon of pop culture.

Sex. Something that is part of human nature. Everyone does it and strives to have their happily ever after… Right? In a society where intimacy and romance are constantly everywhere, someone breaks from the mould after years of self-discovery. They send a letter to their past self full of their experiences and lessons learned, in the form of a short documentary. A-Okay brings attention to the hyper-sexualized and romanticized society we live in and how it’s expectations, stigmas, and stereotypes can be harmful to individuals on the aromantic and asexual spectrums.

Películas is the name of a poetry book by Luís Miguel Nava, a homosexual poet, born in Viseu, who died in Brussels and whose magnificent poetic work remains widely unknown. Drawn from the filmmaker’s family super8 film archive, and excerpts from the film Un chant d'amour, by Jean Genet, the film builds a “body” marked by memories, by various skins, by Nava's films, by his poems and by its landscapes.

Early 19th-century England is usually seen through the eyes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. Sue Perkins explores a dramatically different version, as lived and recorded by Anne Lister. A Yorkshire landowner, she kept a detailed, partly coded diary, revealing graphic details of her love affairs with women. Regency England was surprisingly tolerant of Anne's chosen lifestyle, and it was only when Anne sought to sink a coal mine on her land that criticism of her private life became public.

Based on an unrealized film script written in 1964 for The Homosexual Law Reform Society, a British organisation that campaigned for the decriminalization of homosexual relations between men, "The Colour Of His Hair" merges drama and documentary into a meditation on queer life before and after the partial legalization of homosexuality in 1967.

A portrait of the lives of a disparate group of patrons and employees at an American watering hole today.

I Always Said Yes is a portrait of pioneering filmmaker Wakefield Poole, whose careers as dancer, choreographer, and director spanned the golden years of Broadway, television, porno chic, and gay liberation.

A feature film that chronicles a complete season of the International Gay Rodeo Association. Roping and riding across north America for the past 30 years, the IGRA's courageous cowboys and cowgirls brave challenges both in and out of the arena on their quest to qualify for the World Finals at the end of the season. And along the way, they'll bust every stereotype in the book.