Dialogue/ Loving yourself as you would love another

Dialogue/ Loving yourself as you would love another is an interdisciplinary video poem that uses drag, poetry, and abstract movement to explore queer adolescence as a relationship of self-looking. The film, and corresponding poetry collection, scaffold a relationship between a primary figure – a young person navigating the challenges and joys of queer adolescence – and ‘the goddess of my mind,’ a mystical drag caricature who begins to visit the protagonist in dreams. Staging the queer coming-of-age narrative as a relationship between two worlds – the dream, and the limited, fleshy body – Dialogue/ reworks the common coming-of-age motifs of queer encounter, the grief of the gendered body, feelings of difference and alienation, rituals of transformation, confusing desires, and early sexual experiences through the gaze of a constant, otherworldly onlooker.