Madsen’s self-reflexive experiment turns the “trap door” of trans visibility (to use Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton’s term) inside out, bringing the spectator into the innards of a universalized trans body. In a meditative final sequence, the thoroughly excavated orifice returns our gaze.

Elegantly shot on black-and-white 16mm stock, Transmutation is a surreal tale of bodily transformation and rebirth(s). Drawing on a host of disparate influences—from the early avant-garde cinema of Buñuel and Deren to the English folk horror wave to the body horror prosthetics of Yuzna and Cronenberg—Jimenez crafts a wholly distinctive world of queered bodies.

A manifesto (or manifisto) on the vulnerability and resiliency of the anus takes the form of a Wagnerian opera. A papier-mâché pair of buttocks, as master of ceremonies, waxes poetic on the writings of Leo Bersani, Gayle Rubin and Patrick Califia amid extended sequences of impassioned, slickly-lit group sex.

A portrait of the late writer, filmmaker, theologian, and fisting evangelist Purusha Larkin, author of the influential text The Divine Androgyne. Through interviews with Purusha’s friends, lovers, followers, and admirers—including BDSM legends Ron Athey and Guy Baldwin—and sun-dappled 16mm photography of the California landscape where Purusha built the titular fisting community, Ashby crafts an elegiac love letter both to Purusha and his world.

The interior space in Jack Smith’s Apartment is made of brick-and-mortar, not flesh, but its curved structural lines—inspired by Islamic architecture—are no less erotically savored. Shot in 1989, soon after Smith’s death from AIDS-related complications, the short was conceived by Serra as “a document for New York's art history,” a necessary gesture of preservation for a soon-to-be-whitewashed realm.