Clay Camero + Queer Futures: Music & Films!

Clay Camero,  aka Caethua has been making folk, psychedelic rock, and folktronic music in the NE underground for over 15 years, has released over 14 albums on underground labels including her own imprint Saxwand Records. Clay has been described as brilliant and prolific, and often writes of her childhood raised on a crumbling farm in Dryden, NY, her brutal adolescence in central Florida where she was bullied for being Queer, and her recent struggles to survive homesteading off-grid on a river in central Maine. She uses haunting field recordings and plays a myriad of instruments in a style all her own. Her lyrics cleverly honor and reinvent the art of the lament. She now plays with her band, 2 amazing musicians Dan Whatley and Maddy Johnson. The band met in counseling school, a special masters program integrating the arts into psychotherapy. They formed the band last year and have been working on arrangements together playing songs off their upcoming album, which is coming out July 12th.

The QUEER FUTURES series centers joy and connection to radically imagine future visions of queer life. Four short films explore fat beauty and liberation, gender-affirming healthcare, nonbinary siblinghood in ballroom culture, and the anonymous connections of a decades-old LGBTQ hotline.

Featuring the Short Films:

HOW TO CARRY WATER: This punk rock fairytale doubles as a portrait of Shoog McDaniel — a fat, queer, and disabled photographer working in and around northern Florida’s vast network of freshwater springs, the state’s source of precious drinking water. Bringing Shoog’s photography to life, the film immerses audiences in a world of fat beauty and liberation, one in which marginalized bodies — including bodies of water — are sacred.

THE SCRIPT: Blending personal interviews with dramatized genre recreations, THE SCRIPT explores the complicated relationship between trans and nonbinary communities and medical providers regarding gender affirming care. With a playful approach toward experimentation, the film invites its participants and its audience to examine the limits of language and the nature of performance in building safe and affirming futures.

MnM is an exuberant portrait of chosen sisters Mermaid and Milan, two emerging runway divas in the drag ballroom community. Celebrating their joy, siblinghood, and unapologetic personas, the film explores the power and beauty of being nonbinary in a community that prizes gender ‘realness.’

THE CALLERS combines anonymous documentary testimony with imagined creative scenes to tell the story of those who have called the oldest queer support line in the UK, seeking guidance on everything from where to find the nearest leather club to how to come out, start a family or mend a broken heart. The film is a love letter to queer memory and possibility, LGBTQ+ community and care, and the power of collective imagination to create the lives we dream of.