Matt Lambert’s ‘Sissy Smut’ Would Never Pass Instagram Censorship

Queers can be a fractious, infighting crowd, but it turns out there is one thing that can unite us in a chorus of approval: the urethral opening of a penis mouthing along to prog rock in Michael Portnoy's Progressive Touch (2020). This Pink Floyd of the pee-holes, as it were, was just one of the pleasures on show at the Volksbühne in Berlin last month as part of Sissy Smut, an ongoing series of queer short films, music videos and erotica organised by the filmmaker and photographer Matt Lambert. Lambert has been living and working in Berlin for over 10 years, writing and directing transgressive short films that expand conventional representations of queer desire on screen, as well as producing music videos for artists including Mykki Blanco, Christeene, and Years and Years.

Although Lambert selected the films on show and programmed the night, he told me he sees his role less as an act of curation and more ‘an extension of my filmmaking world.’ The idea for Sissy Smut developed from his love of ‘doing cinema nights at home,’ where he would show the erotic and explicit works of his friends. He wanted a series that could show films ‘that can’t only exist in digital platforms,’ recreating the sense of intimate communal viewing in the larger space of a cinema.

Queer sex on screen can often be made to feel heavy, serious-with-a-capital-S: forced to bear the burden of resistance to a politics that is not its own. Those politics are real, and dangerous. As Lambert pointed out, an increasing number of states in his native US are passing laws restricting the kind of queer performances shown in the films he programmed at the Volksbühne.

Representations of queer sex can sometimes be nothing more than a vehicle for depicting the trauma of oppression or the virtue of tolerance. These may be important and necessary exercises, but their aim is not exactly to turn you on. What was most striking about the films on show at Sissy Smut was their presentation of queer sex as funny – funny because it is fun. From Brontez Purcell twerking a mattress down the stairs in 100 Boyfriends Mixtape #3 (2016), to Peaches drowning in an orgy of big, luscious tits in her music video for Rub (2015), to the candy-coloured lesbian-femme camp of Alexis Langlois’ Demons of Dorothy (2021), these were films that had the audience whooping, howling and laughing out loud with pleasure.

‘Queer sex is messy and awkward,’ Lambert explained. ‘Everybody has laughed at themselves while having sex – that’s what makes you vulnerable.’ Calling the series Sissy Smut signalled an embrace of the sissy’s vulnerability and weakness, since doing so opens up the possibility of intimacy. Laughing at yourself, admitting you don’t know what you are doing, expresses a moment of weakness that enables you to try something different – like what happens to the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner in David Wilson and Harry Clayton Wright’s Deep Clean (2019). (Treat yourself: look it up).

The films were introduced and interspersed with excerpts from British ‘anti-drag queen’ legend David Hoyle and his The Divine David Presents (1998) television show. After the screening Hoyle hosted a performance night with Shirley Knott and Mojo, the Sword Swallower of Switzerland. Inviting Hoyle to perform was another of Lambert’s intentions for Sissy Smut: to show the ‘lineages’ connecting transgressive queer filmmaking and performance across time.

Hoyle, for example, was one inspiration for Christeene, the star of Lambert’s NSFW short Butt Muscle (2017), which captures fashion iconoclast Michèle Lamy writhing around in sticky, slimly lube with the artist. The kind of performance Hoyle hosted in the Volksbühne’s Rote Salon in turn drew on the gloriously tacky 1990s British drag revues of Blackpool, where Hoyle was born, as well as the cabarets of Weimar-era Berlin. 

Lambert, whose ongoing research project (currently under wraps) focuses on queer communities in the German capital during the 1920s and '30s, feels an ‘obligation to build bridges between different queer generations.’ There is, after all, so much queer cinema and performance that will never pass the content controls of Instagram or TikTok, a fact that makes the support of state-funded institutions like the Volksbühne all the more important. With the evening ending with Hoyle leading the crowd in a rendition of Claire Waldoff’s lesbian anthem Raus mit den Männer aus dem Reichstag (Out with the men from the Reichstag, 1926), and Marlene Dietrich’s Boys in the Backroom (1939), those lineages never felt like such smutty, messy, sissy fun.

The first installment of SISSY SMUT took place on 15 March 2023. 

The event series returns in September 2023 with star performer and writer Brontez Purnell. Further details will be published by Volksbühne.

_{Thumbnail and main image: Alexis Langlois, The Demons of Dorothy, 2015, film still. Courtesy: the artist}