Last year, community arts organizer and DIY artmaker Heather María Ács launched a production company called FemmePower Productions with a goal of intersectional equity on screen and behind the scenes. With the help of some well-placed friends, she made Flu$h, an equal parts hot and hilarious debut short, which Ács wrote, directed, and stars in. It premiered ahead of the Joan Jett documentary Bad Reputation at Outfest in L.A. last summer, and this weekend, the film makes its hometown debut at New York’s LGBTQ film festival NewFest. Below, i-D talks to Ács about her radical, raunchy film about queer punks jerking off rich old dudes to pay the bills, and how she made it look so expensive.
Why tell this particular story now?
I say this in the press release: we are in a moment where there is an unprecedented thirst for queer and trans stories and characters. However, just because Hollywood is curious does not mean that they will tell our stories with any respect or care. They won’t! And they’re not! The content of the film is a world that I’m really familiar with. It’s about a queer punk femme named Roxy who’s orchestrating this group domination session with her fabulous queer friends, and she has a date who is really supportive, and sex work is just sort of — without being disrespectful to people who this is not true for — for this group of people, sex work is an everyday reality.
I appreciate that sex work is not a plot device for conflict in this film.
I wanted to tell a story where nothing bad happens. I know lots of other stories about sex work that range from annoying to incredibly dangerous, and that’s not the story I wanted to tell. I wanted it to be fun, to be sexy, to be joyful, to be funny. In the midst of this horrendous world, when do we get to see that? Here, we get to be together and make jokes, and now we have this money, and we can go have a date! We can go buy groceries! Or shoes! They’re all equally justified.
Another thing I love is how you invoke the classic queer relationship trope of the butch misfit and the boss-bitch femme sex worker, but then you subvert it in this really modern-feeling and compassionate way.
One of the elements that’s really important to me is that Roxy has a date who is not just cool with the fact that she’s doing this work, but the character actually helps her set up for the session and hangs out in the next room. They have this sexy game planned and it’s intentional that her partner is there. I don’t want to ruin it, but it’s hot and it’s fun and this is the reality. This is one story for communities that I’m a part of; there’s a sexual interaction that is for exchange of goods and services followed by a sexual interaction that is personal and connected and beautiful and, again, joyful.
Tell me about the process of making your first film.
Going through this has made it clear how absolutely inaccessible this format is to people. But I made an intentional choice to say I want a high production value aesthetic with DIY content, because I believe that we deserve to see ourselves represented with this level of quality. And my cinematographer [Autumn Eakin, The Light of the Moon] has won awards at SXSW! My editor [Janis Vogel, She’s Gotta Have It] has worked with Spike Lee! Most of my actors are trained! It just really difficult to make this stuff, and that has to be acknowledged, too. Even with everything that I had, with Silas [Howard]’s name on it, I did not get programmed at every festival I applied to.
So he executive produced, but you guys have worked together for ages, right?
Silas and I have been longtime collaborators and it’s been really exciting to see someone who came up through DIY art be professionalized in the industry. And he’s always been really supportive of me and my art, whether that means carrying my props to my weirdo performance art events or this. He always brought me with him as he climbed the ranks, so I got to go to film school by being on the set of Transparent and This Is Us and Pose. I feel very lucky for that.
If you’ll allow me mythologize you a little bit, you moved to New York in the 90s, during this very nostalgic, queer punk heyday era. How have you seen things evolve in that subculture, either for the better or maybe in some ways that annoy you?
I feel really lucky, because I did, I caught the last moments of some really cool, amazing things. I lived here when there were still punk clubs on St. Mark’s Place, and I would hang out at the anarchist coffee shop near Tompkins Square Park. I would make — [ laughs] they’re going to get offended, I don’t care — I would make anarchist slop at ABC No Rio with Food Not Bombs.
There was literally a group called G.A.G., which was Gentrifiers Against Gentrification, and like, we were really trying, but that is ripe for comedy! Oh my god, don’t write that, people are going to get mad. But I’m really interested in laughing at ourselves! Radicals are funny! Being so serious is funny, and I want to make the jokes that our community is going to get. Like, with G.A.G., we were really trying to do important and good work. And we did. And also, in retrospect: oh my god, what a disaster! I’m interested in that tension and I do think there are elements of that in Flu$h.
I have had some responses where people are not happy with the tone of the film, and that’s okay. But historically, oppressed communities have used humor as a tool for survival for forever. How else are you supposed to survive in a world that actually doesn’t want you to be alive? In that moment when everybody leaves and Roxy crashes a little, she chooses joy. On a different day, maybe she would need to take space and be alone. Or she might need to only be around other sex workers. But in this version of the story, she’s like, YOLO. It’s the end of the world and we’re going to party.
Could Flu$h be a rom-com in disguise?
It’s festive nihilism.
Flu$h screens as part of NewFest at Cinépolis Chelsea on Sunday, October 28 at 4:15pm. Tickets can be purchased here.