Penis Girl

In which Louise Weard, who has so far been fucking around, finally finds out.

“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

The question has spring-boarded from a conversation about Mennonite Breakfast. I’m at a table in a Seattle hotel bar with the question-asker Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett and Jeanne Thornton. I drove down from Vancouver that afternoon to attend an author reading curated by Casey and Cat’s publishing outfit LittlePuss Press. I had my last $20 in my pocket as I boymoded over the border with a passport that barely looks like me now, which I really should update one of these days so as to alleviate the inevitable anxiety I get from using it. I hadn’t met Casey in the irl world yet and we just announced that I will be adapting her novel, so the opportunity to show up at her event and sing some karaoke together was unmissable.

The reading is incredible; exactly what I’d expect from publishers renowned for their ability to throw a great party. “This is nothing,” Casey tells me, encouraging me to come to one of the real parties in New York. I look around and think about how I’ve never been at a film related event that had this many trans creatives in a room — or at least I haven’t been invited to one. When the night switches over to karaoke I have the intention of singing my go-to song, but Casey beats me to it. So I stand near the front of the bar screaming along as she passionately belts out Hole’s Violet. At some point a bouncer at the bar is a transphobic dick towards one of us so we all bail and I follow everyone back to their hotel. I think about how I love the experience of a group of trans girls as some sort of pack animal, immediately jumping to comfort and defence when bad shit happens. I hope I never fuck up stupidly enough that I end up a lone wolf.

Cat and I end up spending the walk back to the hotel discussing the differences between the independent film and literary industries. There are significant differences, it turns out, and we spend the half hour walk blowing each other’s minds as we talk numbers. I often forget that I’ve been doing film for a decade and ended up some kind of authority on the subject just by merit of being naturally gifted at it. Why does everyone want the insider details from some dumb bitch who directed a computer fucking movie over a decade ago? But I have all the answers so my phone keeps on ringing. I think about how weird it is that my advice seems to work out for everyone except myself.

“You look like a Catholic,” Cat says.

“No… But I know some dolls that converted as a bit. I’m spiritual, yes, but that’s not really my thing.”

I’m sitting at a table with people whose work I admire, including my favourite writer — and I’m adapting her book? The sensation is both surreal and the most normal place I could have seen myself in at this moment in my life. If I like something that someone makes I have always closed the gap between me and that person. Sincerity goes a long way. Before I introduced the screening of Actors in Chicago I remember that Betsey turned to me and said, “Louise, I really thought you were fucking with me this whole time.” I don’t think I could be inauthentic with someone if I tried. I have a big personality and control every room I’m in. Maybe this is why everyone likes me, or at least I think they do. Whenever I met girls who acted like this nobody seemed to like them very much. Maybe my personality is more clockable than my shoulders.

The religion talk continues and I let it slip that I am, in fact, a Catholic. “My dad is Roman Catholic, he took me to the Vatican as a kid and everything.” “I fucking knew it!” Cat is thrilled. I think back to my first day taking ladypills and that immediately as the spiro went down my throat I had Dionne baptize me in our crumbling apartment’s bathtub. The conversation is going too well and everyone likes me too much and my inclinations towards attempting to be unlikable take over. “A newspaper recently called me transphobic.” I use this icebreaker a lot now. I was working on a pilot in mid-March at my below-the-line day job and a boy I found cute was talking about Million Dollar Extreme World Peace and I couldn’t help myself, using the next line in my script: “Have you heard of Red Scare?” It’s truly the perfect filter to determine how the rest of my story will go over with my audience. I finished my spiel to the cute boy by joking, “You have no idea how bad of a person I am. How else do you end up two degrees separated from Sam Hyde?” It sinks in that there is more truth to this than I realize. So far nobody I’ve talked to has ever known what Red Scare is.

“Oh, so you weren’t joking when you mentioned knowing the people being Catholic as a bit… What the fuck, Louise. You do realize that those people are not on our side, right?”

Cat is the first person to challenge me after talking about Actors. You can’t even comprehend how good that felt. Every single time I associated with that movie — a film which I genuinely sincerely love — the reactions from my trans film friends and acquaintances shocked me with how positive the feedback was. The worst I got: I disagree with you but love that you’re doing what you’re doing. Now here was someone challenging me that what I was doing was politically and ideologically not okay, actually. Finally, some justification for the voice in my head that kept telling me to feel bad. The voice that enters my thoughts every time a Dimes Square personality asks if I want to grab a drink — everyone thinks I must live in New York. The thing is: on a rational level I don’t actually think that there is a moral judgement to make on myself for liking a movie and enabling its filmmakers to beat the transphobia allegations levelled against a film which I genuinely believe is not malicious in any way. Hell, I don’t even think that whole film and culture scene is inherently fascist or full of nazi filmmakers who need to fuck off or whatever. I like cinema and I especially like to support cool people doing cool things with the medium. I can and should do that, because I love Cinema as my God and that impulse is the driving force in my life. It’s what keeps me alive.

I reply: “They’re my friends and I really like the movie. At the very least, the controversy around this in particular is undeserved.” And I’m not bullshitting either. Betsey especially is a really good friend and from my experience a great person; it legitimately bothers me when people make personal attacks towards her and her brother just because they make controversial movies, but, we’re friends so of course I feel protective. Like, it’s equally stupid and amazing that a DIY indie movie could end up in this position; that’s great art, baby. Something that’s worth having a conversation about. It’s exactly the sort of thing that my personality dictates I will gravitate towards. I’m the most anti-establishment film personality in the establishment.

Actors almost did kill me though. Sort of.

I’m in Chicago and staying with my dear friend Will Morris and his soon-to-be-wife Jamie. Actors is screening three times and Will and I are going to be at every one. There is a pizza place next to the top secret location of the screening, where we meet with Betsey and Peter and one of the guys from Ion Pack. I can tell I make them nervous. The weird thing is that in spite of me being a very chaotic film personality, I have a lot of actual industry clout and important connections. That, mixed with the fact I call myself a fucking tranny and say other brazen and potentially problematic shit has me suspecting that everyone at the table must think I’m trying to bait them into saying something cancellable. Maybe I am and don’t realize it. Maybe I’m hoping that there’s parts inside of them that are just as dark as mine. I mention the really long movie I’m making and we end up talking about Lav Diaz.

The screenings go great. I introduce the movie and my contextualization of it puts the audience in the desired space for them to enjoy it in the way I do. The handful of other trans girls who show up all like it too; I’m so relieved. I talk a lot with Joe Swanberg, which is a big deal to me because I was truly obsessed with the mumblecore scene. Those movies were perhaps the biggest inspiration on why I felt I could make Computer Hearts at 19-years-old. Back in 2012 I remember watching Tao Lin and Megan Boyle’s flicks with my boyfriend/Computer Hearts co-star back in our semi-closeted pretending to be a cishet couple but still definitely queer though crypto trans phase. Damn, did that ever open up DIY filmmaking for me in a new way. We were both Instagram mutuals with Tao and Megan and DM’d sometimes. I appreciated that we were the only people at the time with a big enough ego to shill our work on 4chan. Should I even be admitting this here? After I introduce Actors I chain smoke cigs in the basement and a dude comes down to vape. He loved my intro. He says a lot of things I won’t repeat here because I have enough industry knowledge to know you should not say those things, especially in the company of someone as well-connected as I am. But that impulse I have towards chaos and self-obliteration has me accept his invite to go out with him to his friends’ place after. As I get into a car Jamie asks Will, “Why is Louise going with those people?” “She’s figuring some things out.”

I was, unfortunately, not the only person shilling my work on 4chan’s /tv/ board a decade ago. There were a few now long forgotten users who for some reason believed that posting their work on 4chan could yield them some sort of clout, by what reasoning of which to this day I still can’t wrap my head around. I know I did it because I have a humiliation kink and crave negative attention, the communal schadenfreude of which resulted in me successfully crowdfunding Computer Hearts by running banner ads on /tv/. But I had been on 4chan since 2007, after a boy I had a crush on introduced me to the website during a sleepover, so I understood the way it’s community operated. By that point I’d grown up with it as the only place I had any sort of outlet for being a true weirdo, after all. When Will, Jamie, and I were smoking cigarettes in Swanberg’s basement and talking with Peter and Betsey before the screening I brought up the notorious Crumplar piece about the filming of www.RachelOrmont.com and celebrated what from the article sounded like Peter had accomplished in attempting to bring the environment of a 4chan thread to life on screen. “Oh, you mean the most important line in the entire article?” Jamie and I told them what we thought were comedic stories about using the site as adolescents and how much it fucked us up, but they were pretty shocked by how dark the rabbit hole used to go. This acted as a launching point to crack a joke about what used to be one of my favourite internet rivalry stories: “Have you guys ever heard of James Healey?” Nobody had heard of him. “Well have you heard of Penis Boy.” Smirks on faces, yeah I’ve seen that one.

James Healey was the archetypal clout chaser, a guy who would weasel into any community where he saw an opening. In 2012 there was a burgeoning following developing on 4chan’s /tv/ board for a new website called Letterboxd and we all shared beta codes with each other in a daily “/lbg/” thread: Letterboxd General. Community on 4chan has a lot to do with establishing goals and attempting to accomplish them: we wanted to hold the top four most popular user spots on Letterboxd. All of the /lbg/ users who made the top four now use she/her pronouns with the exception of James Healey, who is one of the users most responsible for why there are community guidelines on Letterboxd. James Healey would constantly shill his student film, Mindless, in the daily /lbg/ threads after adding a page for it on Letterboxd in hopes that it would get eyes on the film. It worked, everyone watched it. Not because it was good but because it was fun to dunk on James in our Letterboxd reviews. I remember thinking it was the worst film I had ever seen at the time, wrote something extremely vicious in my review, and went on to show every one of my irl friends the worst thing I had ever seen. James and I became friends. So it goes. I did not like James Healey, he is not a good person, but it’s weird what being in a community causes you to let slide (mainly, for James Healey at least, transphobia) and we had a tiny tight knit community of emerging filmmakers sharing feedback with each other on Letterboxd and 4chan. Because of this, we would confide in each other about projects we were working on, sharing scripts and rough cuts and offering guidance. Healey and I had a huge rivalry on 4chan based on which one of us was the worst filmmaker, pitting two of our upcoming movies against each other: Computer Hearts versus 7 Train, which would be more cringe? Computer Hearts was released and ended up one of the lowest rated films on Letterboxd, it seemed inevitable that New York filmmaker enfant terrible James Healey at the very least wouldn’t be the guy behind the movie where that “fat lesbian” fucked a computer. In a moment of trust, James came to me with a dilemma: his producer suggested that he should retitle his film Penis Boy based on some graffiti shown in the film. “If it doesn’t go over well, I just really don’t want to be known as the guy that directed Penis Boy.” I spent an hour convincing James that this was seriously the best idea ever and like come on, how could he not name his film Penis Boy, it’s a bold auteur move. James Healey was roasted so hard upon the film’s release that he requested that Letterboxd take the film’s page down. He pivoted to seeking clout by running gimmick Twitter accounts like Women Posting Their Ls and leaning into the alt right and crypto grifts, all while still claiming to be a filmmaker as if he could ever be taken seriously as one again. Today, he’s still most known for being the director of Penis Boy, or at least people know of Penis Boy if not the boy behind it. At the time I remember thinking: thank god I never became the fucking joke. So in the basement of a secret micro cinema in Chicago on February 11th, 2023, we laughed about the guy that made Penis Boy.

Post-Actors screening, my phone runs out of data as I arrive at our destination. No Uber out of here. I’m overwhelmingly excited from the adrenaline, building up such an, in actuality, mundane experience into something almost erotic for its up-close flirtation with cancellability. The truth is I really like my position in film as it is, where I get to do the things I like with people I like, which is why I won’t include a single fucking incriminating detail. Every name someone drops is someone that would immediately obliterate my career to be even tangentially associated with (and information which consecutively could domino to take a lot of well-respected people down with me — is this a threat, Lulu?). What a fucking rush. Reality finally sinks in after twenty minutes: I am wearing heels and the other woman there whispers to me, “You know a real lady would know to take her heels off in someone’s home.” It’s presented innocuously and with a tone that at worst could be interpreted by a non-transsexual as moderately condescending. My skin crawls though because it reminds me of a feeling I only get from the way my mom talked to me when I started transitioning. Well, I love my mom and she loves me in spite of the fact she can’t help but say the occasional transphobic comment about my life choices, and now here I am in a place where someone who is not my mom is casually dropping a comment like that. Is it meant to sting? Why is that guy there exclusively calling me “buddy” and “bro” in place of my name or pronouns. Oh shit, there’s the real world consequences for my actions. Fuck around, find out. After a conversation with a nice guy who used to work at Vice — “I mean we laughed when Gavin told the occasional racist joke but it stopped being funny when he started bringing IQ studies into the office.” — I asked for a ride back to Will and relayed my experience, us commiserating about how such a beautiful wonderful piece of art made by people we love could also be liked by people like that. What the fuck, Lulu. The dawning of the fact that supporting a movie labelled as transphobic, even if you don’t feel that it is transphobic, will most absolutely still attract an audience who is interested in it because it has developed a reputation for being transphobic. When I get home to Vancouver I feel like shit and drink a bottle of rye in the bathtub and pass out, waking up choking on water. What was the first thing you said in your introduction? “Who’s ready to experience a transphobic act of violence!” Everyone laughed. The joke is on you, Louise Weard. Welcome to your transgender minstrel show. At least it’s sold out.