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In this conversation, Jenni Olson and Jiz Lee discuss various forms of experimentation with online film exhibition: touching on examples as varied as the early online queer film festivals organized by Jenni Olson in the mid-1990s to the platforms used by porn film festivals in times of Covid-19, this interview provides a unique perspective on the challenges and advantages of online film exhibition.

Jenni Olson is an independent writer and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She holds a BA in Film Studies from the University of Minnesota and is currently an independent consultant in marketing and digital film distribution. Jenni’s career encompasses virtually every branch of the queer film festival ecosystem. Her two feature-length essay films—The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015)—premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and, like her many short films, have screened internationally to awards and acclaim. Her film criticism has appeared in numerous publications including Filmmaker Magazine, The Advocate, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian and she is currently a film columnist for Logo TV’s NewNowNext. Jenni also served for more than a decade as director of marketing at Wolfe Video and she is currently co-director of The Bressan Project, devoted to restoring and re-releasing the films of pioneering gay filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. Jenni is a former co-director of the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, the oldest and largest queer film festival on the planet. She co-founded the legendary Queer Brunch at Sundance, and she co-created the pioneering LGBT online platform, PlanetOut.com—which hosted the first online queer film festivals.

Over the past decade, the award-winning, non-binary, porn performer Jiz Lee (pronouns: they/them) has appeared in more than 200 adult film projects shot in six countries, in genres ranging from independent erotic films to hardcore gonzo pornography. Lee’s experiences navigating their personal life as an out sex worker inspired them to create the 2015 anthology Coming Out Like a Porn Star, a collection of essays by adult film industry workers on the social stigma of sex work. Lee has spoken at Princeton University, Stanford, the American Studies Association Conference, and Wonderlust Helsinki (awarded by the Finnish Association for Sexology). They were featured on MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, G4TV, and, proudly, Lifehacker. When not in front of the camera, Lee works behind the scenes as marketing director at Pink & White Productions, the San Francisco-based production company behind the award-winning CrashPadSeries.com and PinkLabel.TV—an online platform where audiences around the world can experience a different type of adult cinema, as well as the types of bodies and desires that aren’t often depicted on conventional adult websites. In 2020, they helped to organize, through PinkLabel.TV and Pink and White Productions, the San Francisco PornFilmFestival—a festival that was forced to pivot to an online format.

Jenni Olson: Thank you so much for doing this! The idea behind this interview is to capture a brief overview of the history of queer online film exhibition, including queer adult online film exhibition—to draw a trajectory from my early work up to your pioneering work. The framework I was given was this idea of technological utopia or dystopia: how do these online festivals speak to various historical moments? And I feel that in some ways, online festivals are utopian, in other ways dystopian.

One of the most exciting things to me was the opportunity to talk about my early history: it’s incredible to think we, me and my little team of colleagues, launched the PopcornQ Online Film Festival in 1997! Before the festival, we did what we called PQ Online Cinema in 1996. We scanned some items from my personal queer film collection: old queer movie trailers, as well as random short things such as the footage of Anita Bryant getting the pie in the face or the Charles Nelson Reilly Jell-O commercial.Footnote 1 These are just some of the things I own on 16 mm and 35 mm film that were telecined to video and then we digitized them to put them online. This was long before YouTube.

At the time, we were using RealVideo and RealMedia. I don’t know if it even exists anymore, but I remember that it almost felt like a silent film because the frame rate was very choppy and the image was the size of a tiny little square. The quality was not great: we were using dial-up modems at the time. In any case, it was incredibly exciting that people from all over the world could see these films.

I wanted to create a film festival. I decided to partner with MIX, the New York Experimental Queer Film Festival, as opposed to a more mainstream kind of queer film festival.Footnote 2 We showed experimental works, which I think is just really cool. In preparation for today, I used the Wayback Machine to look back at the page of the first online queer digital film festival organized by PopcornQ. A couple of things jumped out at me. For instance, the fact that we used the word queer, in 1996. One of the great things about PlanetOut.com was that, from its very beginnings in 1995, we advertised ourselves as “LGBT.” Back then, there was a lot of “lesbian and gay” content. It was a big deal to affirm ourselves not as “lesbian and gay” but as “LGBT.” So, we were first LGBT, and then quickly we became queer.

I was also struck by this sentence on our website: “Thanks to the unique capabilities of the Internet, you can offer feedback to the filmmakers and the curators by simply emailing us here at PopcornQ.” We didn’t have a feedback form: you could email us, and we would get your comments to the filmmakers. The same applied to filmmakers who wanted to submit a film: they were supposed to mail us their VHS tapes so they could be curated.

Jiz Lee: VHS was the format you were accepting?

Jenni Olson: Yes. At the time, it was typical for festivals to ask for submissions to be done on VHS. This was before the days of DVD. The exhibition would then be done on higher level tapes, such as 3/4in or beta tapes. For the PopcornQ online festival, we had to digitize the tapes that were accepted, which was not a common thing at the time.

The response we got was amazing: there was this sense that people were watching all over the world. Obviously, only to a certain degree was that the case: it was a very small-scale operation. After all, not everyone had the Internet or the capacity and interest to watch things online. We have come a long way!

Jiz Lee: In terms of the format of this festival: did you do a form of broadcast streaming or were the films just available on the site? Did everyone watch the films at the same time?

Jenni Olson: It was just on the site. We had a launch event. We did a big announcement, and the content was up on the website for a while. The first festival was very modest: it was four shorts, and they were short shorts, less than 10 minutes. The shorter, the better: at the time, we thought three minutes was ideal because the files seemed gigantic and the technological limitations were really substantial. It wasn’t possible to do a live thing. But it was exciting and so drastically different from what we can do today.

We did this annual festival for a few years. We launched PlanetOut in 1996, and we organized the First Online Queer Digital Film Festival in 1997. We had festivals in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000. After that, we shifted to a different format: the PlanetOut Short Movie Awards. It was similar, but we structured it in a different way: we would get submissions and do a top five in certain categories. There was a competition, with a jury process. It was very exciting. The films were really, really good. That was in the heyday of the first dot-com boom when money was floating around: all these sites were spending millions of dollars, thinking that they would, somehow, magically be profitable someday. They were just throwing millions of dollars at things and we were like “OK, throw a million at us.” One of these companies that don’t exist anymore—it was either Atom Films or iFilm—gave us a quarter-million dollars to sponsor the PlanetOut Short Movie Awards. The structure was such that the filmmakers got compensated. This was important for me: as a filmmaker, I was constantly asking myself: “Is this good for the filmmakers? Are they being exploited? What about their other rights and other territories: what happens if they want to have their film on HBO or some other venue?” It was about contracts, about anticipating all those things. This was not easy: it was the Wild West. There wasn’t an established framework for online exhibition: was it considered as home video or as broadcast? This framework was restrictive.

The Planet Out Short Movie Awards went on through the mid-2000s, until PlanetOut.Com bit the dust. The entire thing fell apart and disappeared. It’s really sad. Right after Planet Out, I moved to Wolfe Video. One of the most exciting things I did there was to create and launch WolfeOnDemand.com, which was the first, dedicated global LGBT film streaming platform.Footnote 3 It’s still up and running. Now, there are all kinds of streaming services specializing in queer cinema (e.g., Dekkoo and Revry). When we launched the PopcornQ Online Cinema, it was hard to imagine that we would get to this point.

Jiz Lee: It sounds like it was a formative period. It was not just validating filmmakers and inspiring or pushing the craft in a new direction, but also laying the groundwork for the festivals that would later come—in terms of curation and structure. I’m thinking, among other things, about your experience working with Frameline.Footnote 4

Jenni Olson: I’m trying to think of other online festivals in the period. Sundance did it for a minute, in 2000 or 2001. It was called the first Sundance Online Film Festival. It was very exciting. I had a film in it, which was cool—my one-minute queer short, Meep, Meep!. And then they stopped: they probably found it to be too complicated and daunting. Queer festivals didn’t really do a lot of online exhibition over the years. Now, of course, we are in a pandemic, twenty or twenty-five years later. Outfest now has a streaming platform: they do year-round programming.Footnote 5 And of course, all of the festivals did actual online festivals this past year: ten days presentations, with live exhibition or a combination of live Q & A and pre-recorded content.

Jiz Lee: One thing that’s interesting to me is that some of these larger festivals used to not accept films that already had an online premiere or that were already available online. Now, these festivals are doing an online version because they have no choice if they want to keep going, and the rules around whether a film can be available online prior to a festival screening are starting to change ….

Jenni Olson: Yes, festivals had to loosen their rules, especially in relation to one another. Festivals are ideally trying to keep some degree of exclusivity, using some form of geo-blocking when they can. But even then, there is now a sense of “you just have to get films out there ….”

Jiz Lee: In the adult world, there have been questions from new filmmakers as to whether or not having a film online before it had the chance to premiere in various cities would hurt them and impact a film’s circulation on the festival circuit. As far as I understand it, the reason why these directors want to focus on having a premiere at specific festivals is that they are looking at distribution and at attracting agents. Basically, they are shopping around to find an interested buyer who will then take the film and offer the filmmakers money, a contract, licensing, and all of that stuff. This was more of an issue before Covid-19, but I always thought it was a little strange because, in the adult film world, we don’t have that option: the financial scale is just not there. So, it doesn’t make any sense to limit a film’s distribution, since that whole component has been taken out of the equation.

Jenni Olson: That’s interesting. I come from the more traditional world, where there is an order that you do things in. When I made a deal with PinkLabel.TV around the films of Arthur J. Bressan JR, my assumption was that it was really important to have one exclusive online place where you could see them.Footnote 6 I wanted that place to be PinkLabel.TV. In other words, I was thinking that it was valuable to you as a platform and to us to not just have these films showing all over the place but to have a single exclusive platform. Our original plan was to premiere these restored films, Passing Strangers (1974) and Forbidden Letters (1979), at PinkLabel.TV’s San Francisco PornFilmFestival, which was last summer or rather was supposed to be last summer. Obviously, that didn’t happen. We were also in the middle of arranging for a physical premiere at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. I had made some other arrangements for physical screenings: we were selected at the Oslo LGBT film festival, which ended up being virtual. Everything got messed up, but then it was amazing that we were able to make these arrangements and that both of those films have now been available worldwide through PinkLabel.TV. This gave us a ton of press exposure. From a filmmaker standpoint, or rather as the representative of the late filmmaker, it has been an amazing experience to have these films on your platform (see Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1
A screenshot of the pink label dot t v exhibits information about the Bressan project. Username and password options are displayed in the right corner. A quick search option is also available.

“The Bressan Project on PinkLabel.TV.” PinkLabel.TV. February 9, 2021. https://pinklabel.tv/on-demand/studio/the-bressan-project/

Full size image

Jiz Lee: It has been really exciting to be able to offer them. I know that people appreciate them. I loved watching these films and then being able to catch the interview you did with Robert Adams.Footnote 7 It’s truly a piece of history or a time capsule: these films are very historical and relevant.

Jenni Olson: You were able to offer the best experience … We got to do this Zoom interview with Robert and to offer that as an extra. It’s great that people can just watch this interview without seeing the films. Then hopefully, they get intrigued and want to watch the films. That being said, I’m a little bit curious technologically and philosophically: I would love to hear you talk a little bit about your history and the importance of queer adult film exhibition in general, and in particular of PinkLabel.TV.

Jiz Lee: This is a bit of a full-circle story, coming back to festivals! Shine Louise HoustonFootnote 8 was inspired to create PinkLabel.TV after attending the PornFilmFestival Berlin. She had been making films and attending festivals and went to Germany to attend the Berlin Porn Film Festival sometime around 2008. She was astounded at the breadth of adult films that were presented at the festival and that she was able to watch in the theater. There were shorts, there were remastered special presentations, there were animation films, there were films that one might not have necessarily considered as porn had they not been presented in that context (films that had nudity or dealt with eroticism and sexuality in some creative way). She was inspired by the diversity, craft, and creativity she saw in Berlin—by this way of looking at porn as a medium and as an indie film genre. The festival seemed to be asking: “what is it possible to do with this craft, this art form?” She wanted other people to see what she saw.

She immediately thought: “Well, I have this porn site, CrashPadSeries.com. Could I do another site and post a couple of the films I saw in Berlin?”Footnote 9 We launched PinkLabel.TV around 2012: it was conceived as a Video-on-Demand platform where we would be able to host fellow filmmakers and studios (the kind that she had seen in festivals). We wanted to create a viable, sustainable, financially beneficial business model that could sustain filmmakers, give audiences a chance to see the films that she appreciated, and hopefully encourage more filmmakers to make films.

It’s sometimes hard to describe what type of porn is on the site because people often have preconceived ideas of what porn can be. The way people define porn varies greatly depending on whom you are speaking to. Most people think of porn in a very specific, maybe mainstream, way: their porn is often heterosexual, or at least very cisgender (including cisgender lesbian or gay). It’s often limited to specific body types and kinds of sex. This limited idea of porn is not necessarily a bad thing, but we are interested in questioning what porn can look like and how porn as a genre can be expanded. It’s about opening the box: there is a whole bunch of different types of porn. On PinkLabel.TV, we have everything: it’s a bit of a who’s who of making work. If it crosses Shine’s path and if she’s curious about it, it might end up on the site. I like to say that there’s almost something for everyone. We have both vintage and contemporary porn.

Our goal was to be able to have these films available on the site, organized similarly to the porn film festivals we attended. In other words, it’s not going to be: “here are films with this type of body.” It’s more of a mixture: programming one of your documentaries alongside docu porn, sex ed. porn, porn that are funny … It’s very important to be able to categorize and curate them ourselves: we want to contextualize how the films are viewed and to guide interpretations of what the spectators are watching. This differs from most contemporary porn sites, where people just come to watch porn. Earlier you mentioned utopias and dystopias. To some extent, this is a binary. Utopias and dystopias, it’s a fantasy—an optimistic fantasy or a pessimistic one. Neither of these two terms is true or even attainable; they are just ideas and concepts. But talking about trying to create spaces or to build utopias: one of the goals of the site is to create our own space, and that’s a super queer thing to do. The question we are asking is: what do we want porn to look like? So, that’s the space we are building.

Jenni Olson: I love PinkLabel.TV so much: it has a utopian quality to it. Its ethos feels very queer, but also very Bay Area to me. It is sexy, but it is also political, smart, and engaged with culture and ideas. It also represents various kinds of diversity. And you have an anti-violence element …

Jiz Lee: We have content notes. It’s similar to a title card that gives a warning, for example, of flashing images. We are used to watching television and media where a title card will display: “This [program] has nudity and explicit language.” We try to do something similar to this when we feel that it might be appreciated by the people watching our films, or if we can anticipate that a question or an issue may come up during a screening. We specifically decided to not use the phrase “trigger warnings” because sometimes it can be an issue to even define something as a “trigger.” I’m being vague, but one example is kink: one person’s kink might be someone else’s trigger. To otherize that kink and stigmatize it isn’t helpful. We use content notes as a more neutral term.

Jenni Olson: The other utopian aspect is the idea that there is a business model—that the site itself survives, but more importantly that it compensates filmmakers for their work and actually pays people. I’m blown away because I have one little, tiny short film on your platform, my quirky 2003 archival lesbian porn short Matzo Maidels, and I regularly receive small royalty checks from you guys. I have been in the general business for thirty years. I have worked in the adult world here and there for a long time (we did some adult stuff when I was at PlanetOut). In the adult and the indie film worlds, there are many examples of filmmakers who are just not being compensated at all (or supposedly will be, but they never receive anything). It’s just mind-blowing to me that you have a business model that works and that genuinely pays people.

Jiz Lee: Thank you for saying so. One of our missions is to support filmmakers. We are filmmakers ourselves! It behooves us to be ethical and conscious about paying people. When we distribute our own films on other sites, we sometimes have to chase down money from a company and email them again and again. We have been on this side of the business and it’s awful. It feels good to know that our filmmakers won’t have to worry about whether or not we are going to pay them, whether or not we are trustworthy. Shine would like PinkLabel.TV to be known as the Criterion Collection of adult movies!

Jenni Olson: Can you just talk a little bit about this moment, in terms of the pandemic? The San Francisco Porn Film Festival you organized ended up as an online experience. How did it work, practically? What was the response? Did you reach people? Did it seem utopian?

Jiz Lee: Wow, what a time to talk about utopias and apocalypses. We joked that we were organizing this festival in the middle of a fiery pandemic. This is not even an exaggeration: wildfires in California were out of control, the air was toxic, and we were in the middle of a global pandemic. We had planned to launch the San Francisco Porn Film Festival in August [2020], at the Brava Theater for the Arts. We were already thinking about including some kind of online element, but it was going to be on a smaller scale. When it became clear that Covid-19 was a big deal, we decided to pivot … We decided that we should just take it all online. The Brava Theater agreed to keep our deposit for next year’s edition. We hope to do an in-person festival at the Brava Theater in the future and to multicast at the same time, which would enable us to offer an online experience of the theater itself.

When we decided that we were going to do the festival online, we had to shift our operation and refocus our efforts. Our web developer Kriss Lowrance is highly resourceful: they were able to build a platform that would enable us to broadcast the films. We also did a fundraiser. We received a lot of community support, which enabled us to guarantee artist pay—we ended up doubling our initial promise of what the artist fee would be by the end of the campaign. This community support also allowed us to be able to focus on what matters: thanks to our developer and these resources, we were able to work on the site and to spend time on the curation of the festival. The festival was three days long. It included over 90 films.

We wanted to be able to use the platform we built not just for ourselves, but also for other festivals: we were guinea pigs, testing it out and making sure that our platform could sustain an online festival. Then, we were able to offer it to other festivals impacted by Covid-19 (festivals that were planning on using a theater but had to pivot because theaters were closing and the situation in their country was still really bad in terms of Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations). We essentially offered the service for free to other festivals. This allowed them to continue their operation and their curation planning for the year. It’s important: sometimes, when a small festival skips a year, it doesn’t come back. A lot of small festivals are run by volunteers. There is momentum behind them and a legacy. If they miss out on a year, a whole year goes by, and sometimes, the festival just doesn’t come back. So, we wanted to support them.

We are also seeing, on an international scale, that these indie porn film festivals are encouraging more works to be made. We have appreciated being part of them: helping these festivals keep going helped us keep going. Another way of looking at it is that, since we can’t attend these festivals, we want these festivals to come to us. Shine would go to festivals. If she liked a film, it would likely end up on PinkLabel.TV. Because we hosted some of these festivals, they are sending us their curation: we can look at the films and find new filmmakers that we like, who may be interested in joining our site. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having the contact information of curators and filmmakers, as being able to correspond with filmmakers directly to get introduced to works that we didn’t know about. Last year, we added 230 films to the site, which was the most we ever added in one year. So, hosting these festivals benefited us in that way. It made us familiar. On a personal level, I was able to focus my energy on something that I had control over, which was rewarding. It felt like I was doing something with my time. It was nice to be able to make things happen, despite everything else going on, despite productions being paused.

Jenni Olson: In this odd way, and it is true of the pandemic in general, there have been these gifts out of it, around community and the importance of connection. The phrase “we keep us safe,” that concept, is what you are describing. There is a similar quality in the LGBT film festival circuit and the LGBT indie film world. It encompasses the festivals, the distributors, the publicists, the filmmakers, and various institutions around it: I like to say that it is an ecosystem. Frameline San Francisco tends to be the hub of this ecosystem. PinkLabel.TV seems to have a similar role in terms of its leadership. You hosted some of the biggest players. The Berlin Porn Film Festival and CineKink were hosted on your platform.Footnote 10

Jiz Lee: We asked the Berlin Porn Film Festival, before deciding that we were doing the festival online, for their blessing to use their namesake so that we would continue as the San Francisco Porn Film Festival. There was already a London Porn Film Festival, a Porn Film Festival Vienna. We wanted to be the San Francisco Porn Film Festival. We asked them for permission, and they told us to run with it. So, we were already in contact with them, before we started hosting festivals on our platform. They have been very helpful in terms of giving us information about festival curation and advice on festival organization. Sharing is important. With CineKink, we shared documents such as submission guidelines. Everyone has been collaborating; festivals helping other festivals.

When we saw that our online festival was a success (given the challenges we faced and that it was our first festival, we impressed ourselves. It went very smoothly!), we opened the platform to other festivals. First, we hosted the Seattle Erotica Cinema Society (SECS) Festival. Then, we hosted the Berlin Porn Film Festival. We also hosted the Athens Porn Film Festival—it was their first edition too! And we hosted CineKink. In the spirit of collaborating with other festivals, our festival also had a showcase that was curated by the London Porn Film Festival and a Latin American shorts program that we had seen at Berlin (Berlin gave us the contact of the curator and we were able to offer that as a guest curation). Uncensored Fest, which we also hosted, included a curation from Vienna Porn Film Festival.Footnote 11

Hosting these festivals was a learning experience: we offered our platform for free, but we used this opportunity to learn and evolve. While there might have been a few technical hiccups, it was a helpful learning experience that enabled us to grow and add features, improving things as we went. For instance, we offered a chat feed: the viewers could use it to chat during the screenings. This feed was also very helpful in terms of immediate tech feedback when someone was having issues with streaming. It was also a good way to add content notes: we could add these content notes in the chat so that viewers would see them in real time and would be warned (we could, for instance, give them runtimes). The viewers could know that the next feature had something that some people might find difficult to watch. We could tell them: “You have five minutes to take a bathroom break, come back later!”

We were a little bit hesitant at first with the chat: we didn’t know if people would be respectful, especially given the conflation of anonymity and sexuality. After all, we had a lot of different kinds of sexuality and desires depicted on screen! We were afraid that people would not be able to be positive about it—that they would not come to chat in a respectful way. Surprisingly, everyone was really, really nice and supportive. We didn’t have to kick anybody out. I was relieved because it’s really hard to be a moderator. It’s also hard as a creator to see disparaging comments about your work. I was glad that people were really kind.

Jenni Olson: This is quite moving. Particularly in this incredibly dystopic moment around the connective capabilities of social media—given that social media has in so many ways lately been an absolute toxic nightmare. I logged onto the SF Porn Film Festival for the premiere of Shine Louise Houston’s latest film, Chemistry Eases the Pain. And there was a live conversation after the screening.

Jiz Lee: Chemistry was our very first test on the broadcasting system. It was our first live Q & A. You got to witness the very beginning of it.

Jenni Olson: There were some slight technical issues, but it was amazing. It was beautiful: the chat and the questions showed a sense of respect for the cast. It was all just so nice and so respectful. I have seen many live Q & As on services such as YouTube and often some people say such horrible stupid things … In a lot of ways, you have created and you participate in a culture that is about a respectful, thoughtful engagement with sexuality. The people who are showing up to watch the films want to engage in meaningful ways. They are not being stupid and obnoxious or rude. This is weirdly utopian in our present context.

Jiz Lee: Our numbers may not be high, but people who are interested in a site such as PinkLabel.TV are the type of people who don’t have a problem with watching a mixture of different types of bodies, sex, and sexual representation. It’s the type of people that are beyond what a marketing person would identify as “the type of person who watches porn.” For such a marketing agent, a person watching porn is a guy, between this and this age, he is cisgender, he is straight, he is white, he is looking for a woman, and he has a very limited and patriarchal view of sex—of what sex looks like, who gets to have it, and who gets to be sexy. In some ways, our site rejects that idea. First of all, because we are not that guy. The question becomes: what do we want to see? This helped to cultivate audiences that appreciate our definition of porn. Being part of that community is important: the people who attend porn film festivals are the filmmakers themselves. Because they are among the audience, you don’t get disparaging, rude comments. It’s a different viewership mentality.

Jenni Olson: Do you have a sense of the percentages of queer … How queer is your festival? And obviously it’s a bit more complex—it’s not a binary, queer vs straight. But if you had to characterize in some way the queerness of PinkLabel.TV and of the porn film festival world ….

Jiz Lee: The question “does it look queer” is funny because people know of Pink and White [Shine Louise Houston’s production company] is a queer company, so they assume that PinkLabel.TV is queer too. We have a lot of heterosexual content (or at least of cis male–cis female pairings). We are heteroflexible. In that way, we are very friendly to the straight porn world: we have always had a lot of female directors who are straight-identified, such as Anna Span out of the United Kingdom, who are making porn for women. The films they make are considered “straight porn.” Because a lot of people know us as a queer company, and because we are going to festivals and are presenting in the same programs as other queer filmmakers, we tend to get more exposure to queer filmmakers. So, I think queer filmmakers happen to know about us more than straight-identified filmmakers. And for the sake of this argument, we are assuming that queer filmmakers are making queer porn and that straight people are making straight porn, even though we know that it is not necessarily the case and that this line is not cut and dry. We also need to keep in mind that a film that pairs a cis man with a cis woman doesn’t necessarily mean that the actors are heterosexual identified.

Our website seems queer friendly. There’s no “enter page” forcing visitors to choose between straight or gay content. It’s not like that. What was interesting about hosting film festivals was that we saw more straight content. If we are just using perception, it seemed like it was straighter, particularly in the case of the festivals we hosted (since we didn’t have any curation over them).

Jenni Olson: All the film festivals in this past year have had to pivot to different kinds of technological solutions. Pivot has been one of the most popular words of the year! It will be interesting to see what the future looks like. A lot of these experimentations with online formats will be integrated into our future experiences of film festivals: we can do online programming and reach people who would otherwise not be getting out to the festivals. I was talking to a friend earlier about Sundance. She is in a wheelchair. She told me that when she goes to Park City, it is terrible: Park City is one of the worst places you could imagine. The ice and the snow and the little, tiny old town. It’s really exciting to be able to do something online that is more accessible. It’s also interesting to see how abled people are benefiting from these more accessible screenings: for instance, captioning technology is helpful for everyone. The level of consciousness raising around the world has been a compelling thing about this moment.

Jiz Lee: I can talk about using A.I. to do subtitling, but this may be a bigger conversation. Accessibility is something we are trying to work on, but it is frustrating, and it is still a challenge. We are using an A.I. closed-captioning system, but it only knows how to translate from one language at a time. If we set the language to English, it takes any film that is not in English and tries to create phonetic English. We ended up with oddball nonsensical translations for any film that wasn’t originally in English. Also, the A.I. is not nuanced: it doesn’t know the difference between dialogue and song lyrics. If someone had a song in their piece, the A.I. was trying to transcribe the lyrics from the song. So, the tech is not there yet.

I also wanted to briefly talk about censorship. Earlier, you mentioned new streaming platforms for LGBTQ cinema. All the available ones don’t allow adult media. We don’t have that same platform option. That’s why we had to make it ourselves. We have the same issue with ticketing agents: a lot of them are not porn friendly. We were lucky with the recommendation from the HUMP! film festival to a ticket agent that would partner with us. Options are very limited options when it comes to adult films.

Jenni Olson: I love that the ethos of PinkLabel.TV as an institution is to create that sense of community. Any final words?

Jiz Lee: I guess my final words would be that adult film has relevance and worthiness within the broader scheme of not only LGBT media but also all film and media. There is a lot of history that is lost through the idea of respectability politics, of not allowing stories that are explicit in their content because of fear around how people respond to shame around sexuality. There is a structuralized censorship of adult media for the sake of children viewing—it’s always about children being exposed to sexuality. But thank you for including adult media in the context of this discussion on technology and utopias. We are so often left out, in so many different ways. It feels really important to be included in that history and in the imagining of futures.