It's an intimate film in a sensitive, not sensational, way. Its movements are subtle, graceful. The way the shots are framed and edited together, the way the story unfolds feels close and gentle. I want to say natural, meaning very much the opposite of the way narratives are forcefully, exploitatively constructed in reality TV and mainstream documentaries.

Gender, art, sexuality - all are subjects here, but in some space more complex and overlapping than label-able, which feels appropriate to the themes in general and, in particular, to Genesis's multiplicitous and shifting gender identity; this relationship's spilling-over beyond hetero- and homonormativity, and the uncompartmentalized intertwining of art, love, and life in this story.

All of this is essential to how this film moved so many of us past what might have been fearful recoil. It is, after all, a film about two people attempting to merge their bodies and identities in a way that could very easily be pathologized as nightmarish codependence. But instead, when Genesis spoke in a Q&A after the screening, it felt like the room openheartedly received their simple, direct statements that we are all a part of each other.

"Each and every one of us," they write, "including those ... who grew up in the Jim Crow South, in apartheid South Africa, and on Indian reservations in the US - was shocked by what we saw....As feminists, we deplore the Israeli practice of 'pink-washing,' the state's use of ostensible support for gender and sexual equality to dress-up its occupation. In Palestine, we consistently found evidence and analyses of a more substantive approach to an indivisible justice."

Read their statement here.

Last week, lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer declined an artistic fellowship in Jerusalem. Although Hammer, unlike the delegation of women of color and indigenous feminists, has not endorsed the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, she writes,

"I accept and exercise my social responsibility as an artist not to lend legitimacy to the State of Israel as long as it continues the occupation. My conscience will not allow me either to participate in programs funded by the current Israeli government at this point in time, or to show my films at venues that receive funding from that government."

This, of course, includes many LGBT film festivals around the world that receive the support as part of Israel's pinkwashing campaign.

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If you go, tell us about these sessions -- or any others you attend and are changed by!

Thursday, 2/3, 9:30 am and 2 pm: The Familiar Made Strange: An Introduction to Disability Justice

Two repeating introductory sessions will focus on the ways ableism and disability impact our various queer trans/gender-non-conforming communities and activism. Both half-day intensives will focus on the fundamentals of disability justice, and the layered connections between disability, class, race, and queerness, and the necessity of embedding disability justice into our social-justice politics.

Saturday, 2/2: 4:45 pm: Disability and Racial Justice

Join the DJC for a pair of conversations - one for disabled people of color facilitated by Mia Mingus and the other for white disabled people facilitated by Sebastian Margaret and Eli Clare.

As one of the organizers says, "If Lyon-Martin health services shuts down, it will be a major step towards San Francisco becoming entirely uninhabitable for low-income queers and trans people." Event info after the jump.

To the Other Side of Dreaming by Stacey Milbern and Mia Mingus is an epistolary blog in which two "queer disabled korean diasporic radical women of color" document their journey to create a home together. Start from the beginning (September) and catch up. Every single entry overflows with wisdom that can help move us all toward sustainable interdependence.

Adrienne Maree Brown's blog: Adrienne Maree Brown is envisioning and practicing a liberatory politics rooted in love, relationship, healing, and the deepest, broadest kinds of transformation. I think it's just the kind of vision the world needs right now, and I tend to nod with agreement, expansion, and excitement as I read each entry.

And, as always, the many contributors at Flip Flopping Joy have written another year's worth of challenging, essential posts on topics ranging from Wikileaks to mothering to meditation and Oscar Grant.

Which blogs blew your mind in wonderful ways this year?

I didn't really get homonationalism before -- I mean, how pervasive it is throughout Europe, how scary it is, how much it demonstrates differences between U.S. and European political climates. (Though there is anti-migrant, or migratist*, racism and violence in both the U.S. and Europe, the forms and underlying narratives of it are different.)

Pictured: Rosa Lila Villa, an LGBTQ community center and housing project in Vienna; the banner reads "Pervs Against Deportation."

In spite of all that, I'm still passionate about print. And here's some of what I've been holding in my hands to read, slowly, contemplatively, lately:

These are a few of the many events that caught my attention:

We'll be offering live performances and video/film/audio works by contributors to make/shift, the feminist magazine I coedit -- including Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Gina Carducci's beautiful and stirring new short film, All That Sheltering Emptiness; a powerful audio piece about love, brutality, and resistance by Alexis Pauline Gumbs of the marvelous Queer Black Mobile Homecoming Project; and a glimpse at genderqueer-fabulous self-defense by Jessica Lawless. Live performers include me, E. Rose Sims aka Little Light, Timmy Straw, Kai Kohlsdorf, Laura Piece Kelley, and Anastacia Tolbert.

And we'll be featuring a special live-performance version of Hilary Goldberg's brand-new film, recLAmation, in which queer superheroes navigate LA after the fall of capitalism.

If you're in Oregon or Washington, I'd love to see you there! Event details after the jump.

Lopez-Mercado, 19, was mutilated and murdered last weekend in Puerto Rico by Juan Martinez-Matos. Martinez-Matos has said he dismembered and set fire to Lopez-Mercado after discovering that Lopez-Mercado had male-assigned genitalia and was "wearing women's clothing"--a remark many fear is setting up a "trans panic" defense.

Jason Mattison Jr., 15, was raped and murdered during the same week in Baltimore, Maryland.

Details about the vigil and others across the country after the jump.

Murders of trans women and gay men in Honduras have escalated rapidly since the coup. She reported that there were 17 documented murders of trans women between March 2004 and March 2009; there have been 15 in the last four months alone. LGBT activists believe most of these murders have been assassinations by military and police, but authorities' refusal to perform autopsies have denied them the opportunity to prove that the bullets a series of trans women, and a few gay men, have taken to their heads have been military-issue.

More after the jump.

If you believe the journey of privileged liberals as they discover more progressive or radical or social-justice-oriented ideas is a useful story to tell in popular culture -- perhaps because such stories might lead to other privileged liberals' being provoked to paradigm shifts or changes in behavior -- you'll likely appreciate how the film shows No Impact Man's awareness that individual action must be linked to collective action and structural change, as well as his discovery (via Majora Carter) of environmental-justice movement, which addresses how racism and economic exploitation connect to "green" issues. I haven't sorted out my beliefs on that matter.

What I want to talk about here is how No Impact Man reveals and shores up a very privileged-American culture of individualism rooted in the isolated, heteronormative nuclear family, and a related lack of critique of capitalism and consideration of broader visions of sustainability and interdependence.

In 1971, a handful of feminists and gay militants shouting "family is pollution" demonstrated for revolutionary sexual liberation. 35 years after, what remains of these ideals and struggles?

That's the opening of The Revolution of Desire, a 2007 documentary about radical-queer activism in early-70s France.

What remains indeed?

More after the jump...

Still, of course, there's a ton of mediocre political art, just like there's a ton of mediocre every other kind of art, and already I'm bored of this limiting-loaded vocabulary ("politics," "art," etc.) and have little desire to type about any of the less-than-ripe things I've seen so far at Outfest. After the jump, notes on some of the very exciting things I've seen in the first few days of the festival -- films that are passionately political and gorgeous, complicatedly layered and insistently in social contexts ... and, often, for those reasons and more, very hot.