A Galactic Aversion to the Mainstream: Theo Jean Cuthand in Conversation with Shaawan Francis Keahna
Credited with coining the term Indigiqueer, for contemporary Indigenous LGBTQI2 people, Theo Jean Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish/Irish) is a filmmaker, performance artist, writer, and curator based in Toronto. Interviewed by Shaawan Francis Keahna, a cross-disciplinary artist, archivist, independent researcher, and filmmaker,Cuthand discussed his work, Indigenous trans visibility in filmmaking, as well as what futures are possible when we draw from multiple lived experiences.
Shaawan Francis Keahna
I was really excited to get to meet you and chat with you, especially because we almost crossed paths at Queer World-Mending, the Flaherty Film Seminar, this past summer. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for the work that you have done.
I dove in first by going to our mutual friend’s house and asking if we could use his gigantic TV to watch some of your works, and then talk about it because I do not watch film in isolation. I do not do well in isolation. Your work has been so resonant and eerily well timed, and I’ve appreciated the opportunity to interface with it.
Theo Jean Cuthand
That’s so great. It’s nice to hear that.
SFK
Would it be super annoying if I talked about the things we have in common as artists? Would that be welcome? Or would that be weird?
TJC
That would be welcome. I’m totally curious.
SFK
I’m Ojibwe and Irish. When I did my obligatory research on you, I learned that you are Cree and Scots Irish. We both started out as lesbians who then became bisexual trans men or trans masc people. We both have these blogs. We both do confessional diarist work. We both seem to have a galactic aversion to the mainstream. The stuff that makes you shiny.
I’ve noticed your style of filmmaking is very conversational. It goes against the institutional expectations of all the men in the film industry with very particular ideas of what gear and sound you use. Your work is narrative, relational based, and doesn’t seem to concern itself too much with being the most expensive-looking thing. I wanted to ask about what drove you into making films with what you have. What is your core discipline with this?
TJC
When I started making videos, it was in the mid-nineties and video artists were starting to talk about broadcast quality. They were starting to get access to technology that I was still too much of an emerging artist to have access to.
They were getting grants to make these super fancy videos, and I had a camcorder. Originally, I was doing VCR-to-VCR editing by going to the artist production center and using the cheapest kind of analog video-editing deck. I wanted to make a point that you could tell a good story without having a whole bunch of money. There were political reasons behind that, too. I wanted marginalized people to realize they could still make a statement without having to search for a huge budget that would help them do it. My videos are driven by a desire to tell stories and not wanting to be held back. Being a queer artist, it feels better sometimes to not have a funder tied to them.
There was this thing happening in Canada in the mid-nineties or so—it was happening in the States, too—where filmmakers were getting in trouble for funding more sexually explicit work or queer work. There was that whole “Our tax dollars are paying for this smut” kind of a thing. That made me feel like I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of somebody going “and the Canada Council funded this and it’s all dildos” or whatever. Getting around censorship was a motivating factor. Also I was just poor.
SFK
One of the pieces we watched together was The Lost Art of the Future. There’s so much in there that expanded my idea of what a film is, or what you could do within a film. The images of all the PrEP pills being beadwork laid down together over the screen, and the needles. [Editor’s note: Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is medicine taken to prevent getting HIV. As recognized by the Center for Disease Control, PrEP is highly effective for preventing HIV and reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99%.] There was so much going on in that film that it made me feel like the pursuit of funding can do a disservice to the story you’re trying to tell. What motivated you when you were a young, emerging filmmaker to continue to do the work and tell the stories you wanted to tell in the face of these changing economic realities? How did you push yourself through that? Because being poor is very hard.
TJC
What kept me going was knowing that I had a unique perspective, being Indigenous, trans, queer, and disabled. It is an interesting intersection to be in because it’s not that my work only applies to people in a specific identity category. Other communities can relate to it. I was trying to speak to all my communities while also representing more people. It’s crossed over into mentoring emerging filmmakers. I’ve wanted to pass along skills so that other people can tell their stories from an authentic place, from a lived experience.
SFK
That mentorship and the lived experience feel really important, especially now. But with regards to all the intersections of your identity, how has being trans and medical transitioned impacted your relationship with your career and also your relationship with being a Native storyteller?
TJC
So much of my early work, and even more recent work, is about being a lesbian and the lesbian community. Now, I’m a bisexual trans man, which is different. It is almost adjacent, but it is different.
When I go to retrospectives, I see films that are about a different lived experience than I have now, which is interesting. I think of all the people I have been: they are kind of still there in me. They still exist, but at the same time, I want to get to the work of now—being trans, the things I want to say about that, and what’s going on currently. This past year, I’ve been writing a lot in my blog about my transition. Overall, it was a joyful transition. I think any of the tough parts of it came from cis people who were having issues with what was going on. But for myself, it was pretty much a joyful thing. I got to have top surgery this August, and that is pretty quick compared to some people. I haven’t gone through and changed my name on all my old videos, and people have asked me about it. It’s a lot of videos to go through to change my name on. A few are more recent, but for a lot of them, I’m not going to go back and put a little label over with my new name. There’s this feeling you’re not supposed to show your dead name. That’s hard career-wise for me because there’s so much information about me with my old name, and to get that changed is a lot of work. There is a complicated relationship to my old career. I am not going to stop showing those videos, but they’re from a different time.
SFK
Names are so, so powerful. As I am stepping back into filmmaking after being away, I know that I exist under an old name that was better known, and now I’m reintroducing myself. It’s something I’ve been grappling with and having conversations with other trans mascs and trans men about, especially—shout out to all of us who started out as lesbians and then we’re not—that’s a whole journey.
I’m interested in the relationship you have with joy. What made your transition joyful? How has your realization about being trans been like for you? When did you realize, and when did you decide, that this was another phase that you wanted to step into as a human being?
TJC
When I was 19, I started questioning my gender, and I had a lot of hesitations, so I didn’t really do anything then. When I was 29, I decided to transition, but I was living in Saskatoon and the “rules” around transitioning were stricter then. It was a small city. Even today, it’s hard for my trans friends to get HRT [hormone replacement therapy] there. Additionally, my family was pretending I wasn’t trans. That made me go back into the closet.
I was trying to figure out my pronouns, and I was getting my friends to juggle all three pronouns: he, she, and they. People were resistant to use the “he” on me, which I found interesting. I went to visit a friend in New Orleans, and she kept calling me “he/him” and I was like, Oh, that feels right. That feels like it’s sticking. I came back to Toronto and was thinking about it more. I went to my doctor to get the gender dysphoria diagnosis. That allows someone to access FTM packers and stuff through Indian Affairs here. I wanted to have access to that.
After I got the diagnosis, I was like, that was actually really easy. Sometimes doctors are gatekeepers. You don’t really know if your doctor’s really going to be an ally or not. I was fortunate enough that my doctor was. I approached her next about getting on hormones, and she sent me to the nurse practitioner, who got me on HRT. Being on testosterone is really fascinating. I was looking for hair growing, watching my hairline change, and watching my muscles get bigger. It was really fascinating. I was taking pictures the whole way. I was like, This is really cool. I think that’s where the joy came in, and mostly it’s been a positive experience.
Most people have been respectful toward me. There was an incident with my family last year, though, before I got on testosterone; people in my family thought I was going to get that whole “’roid rage” thing where they say trans people get angry. There were some people in my family who were saying that was going to happen to me, and that was really upsetting. Just these assumptions about what testosterone does. Dealing with that was hard. Some of my family doesn’t use my name or pronouns. But most of the joy came from already having friends who were trans men. They were all waiting for me to finally get around to it. Ever since I’d tried to transition the first time in 2007, I was still packing a dick off and on. I always knew there was a gender thing going on, but finally deciding or accepting being a trans man was more recent. Being able to ask my friends questions about their experiences was what finally made it okay for me.
SFK
One of your films that I really resonated with was Extractions, the one about family planning and also the earth being cracked open. I was curious about family-planning aspects and the future-building aspects in the work. Has that changed since your transition, or has that clarified?
TJC
Before my transition, I tried fertilizing my eggs, and they didn’t turn out. I was at this point where I thought, I’m not going to do this. It wasn’t that I was not going to have kids, but more that I wasn’t going to work to have kids. If kids come into my life, that’s fine. If I date somebody who has kids, that’s fine. I kind of gave up on kids in that way before I decided to transition. It would’ve been interesting to see how trying to make a baby would’ve been different if I’d been more open to myself being a trans man. There’s a lot of dysphoria-inducing things in getting your eggs frozen and IVF, like all the transvaginal ultrasounds and all the gendered language in that space.
SFK
I’m endlessly curious about people’s transition, but I also want to speak more about your career. One of the films I watched today was She Whistles. It was such a genre and tonal shift from the other work that you had shared with me. I’m really curious about your process of superhero filmmaking in the time when superhero movies are all over the place. How you blatantly put teachings into a superhero film was so daring to me. What was your process, putting teachings and violations of the teachings into a higher-budget project?
TJC
I was working with Sera-Lys McArthur, who plays Stephanie in the film. We did a lot of work to make sure it was okay with our elders. Sera-Lys had an elder who she talked to about how to handle the whistling on set. We tried to approach this aspect in a spiritually aware manner, but it is still true that we’re putting out this teaching that says, “Don’t whistle at the Northern Lights, unless you’re in trouble.”
Parts of what Europeans would call “mythology” are interesting, and I don’t think it’s mythology because I’ve seen Northern Lights do weird things when people whistle. I wanted to talk about something in a very specifically nêhiyaw and Cree way, while also talking about the violence that Indigenous women and two-spirits are experiencing. I wanted a superhero for girls and young two-spirits who are afraid because I think there’s something nice when you have this folk hero that you get to think about. While all this shit is coming down in our world today, there can be this person who doesn’t exist in real life, but you can still feel inspired by or helped in some way.
SFK
I also liked that scene at the end, of swiping through the photos. It made me physically ill, and I mean that as a compliment. There were so many respectful and caring touches in this film that made it feel not like trauma porn. It didn’t feel excessive. It just felt very, very brutal, and very empowering. I hope you all get funded because, even though I have Marvel fatigue, I would watch this.
This brings me to the one-two punch of Less Lethal Fetishes and Reclamation. Reclamation is a futurist documentary telling a story of what’s going to happen when the white people leave for Mars, if they get it together enough to do that. Where did the idea for Reclamation come from?
TJC
I hate Elon Musk, so it came from his whole “We’re going to go to Mars” [assertion]. I was thinking, who’s going to go to Mars? Who’s going to get left behind? As I’ve seen more of how Musk operates, I begin to wonder, Maybe there’s going to be indentured servants up on Mars. I was thinking that if you take the colonizer out of the equation, what are you left with? Can you heal things? Can we go back to a place that was healthy for our communities and our planet? It came from there and from my friends.
All the dialogue is improvised, so some wasn’t my imagining. The baby club where they’re banking babies, that was this ridiculous thing that the group made up. On that other hand, I could see going back to bartering and trade, returning to growing your own plants and food, food sovereignty, and going back to more Indigenous economies. That was what I was thinking of. It’s a very scary time to be in the world right now, and I feel like a lot of people are losing hope. It’s dire. Everything that’s going on with climate change alone, and then when you add conflicts around the world that are happening over resources, it’s pretty sketchy. I feel that we have a responsibility to provide some kind of hope, or at least a pointer and direction of where to go. I wanted people to think that maybe this can turn around, maybe we can do something.
SFK
In Less Lethal Fetishes you referenced your gas mask collection, and you also used gas masks in Reclamation. Less Lethal Fetishes almost felt like the real-world anchor point for Reclamation to me. Reclamation is a mockumentary, and Less Lethal Fetishes is a diary-entry documentary, but it almost felt like the portal through which Reclamation could possibly happen. You’re telling a story about this person stepping down from the Whitney Biennial, war profiteering, and the pressure upon artists. How did you feel grappling with the pressure that gets put on us artists, as people who have this weird, gross push-and-pull parasitic relationship with war and the war machine? What was your storytelling process for Less Lethal Fetishes?
TJC
That film goes over three different things. It starts out taking this ridiculous story about kink before going into the Whitney and all the things that happened there. After that it ends up with how I’m still implicated in this petrochemical industry because they funded a workshop I gave. I mean, I have ADHD, so my thought pattern goes in different branches when I’m thinking about something, but it all goes back to the gas mask. The gas mask is the thread that carries through all three of those topics. I was thinking a lot about how many artists are dealing with getting a big show they’re excited about, and then they find out that the gallery or the museum showing it is involved in some kind of bad pharmaceutical stuff, war profiteering, or destructive resource extraction. The quandary in that.
What do you do? How do you negotiate if you’re going to pull your art out of an exhibition, or if you’re going to keep going? What does it mean if you keep going? With the Whitney Biennial especially, so much came from outside the artists involved. We were getting messages from an organization that was pressuring the artists to pull out. It was weird. It was this career-defining moment, but at the same time, it was all about war. Your big, exciting thing is tainted by this gross money that the Whitney was taking.
SFK
I also have ADHD. I really liked that question you posed: This is your big break. What do you do? How do you negotiate your role? I really appreciated that you were having these questions, while having a sense of humor about it and keeping making art.
TJC
I’m always going to make work, but it makes me sad when I think I might not ever get that budget to make She Whistles into a feature film, or any feature film. Especially with politics being the way they are. It’s a question: If you say you support a free Palestine, what does that mean in terms of funding or being able to continue making work? The blacklisting I’ve been seeing is disturbing. How long has it been going on anyway? How many people have been blacklisted just for having identities that are too complex?
SFK
Do you feel as though the fact that you are all these identities at once, and you come from all these different pasts, is a strength?
TJC
I do think my perspective from being from a bunch of different communities gives me more range in terms of what experiences I can talk about. Having the ability to speak about more than one position is, I think, an advantage.
SFK
I wanted to talk a little bit about Lost Art of the Future and stepping into your own and our own futures as queer men. That feels like an insane thing to say out loud, but because we have so many commonalities, I can bring this up. Coming from a past as a Native girl, with all that entails, and then taking that step into being a queer man in the future, how does that impact your art? How does that impact your storytelling? How does that impact you and your gender?
TJC
I felt that I was a queer man for a long time, and I was, before I transitioned. All my crushes on guys were on gay and bi men. I was like, What is this? I can’t do anything with them because I’m a girl, or whatever I was. When I came out as a guy, all these things went click, click, click, click, click.
I was like, Oh, now it makes sense. It was like finally understanding why my desire was working the way it was. When I dated women, it was mostly bisexual women, but my crushes on men were on queer men. I did try to experiment with straight men, but they’re just not that fun. They’re kind of boring and not very good at it.
When I finally started actually hooking up with men, it was awkward at first, learning how hook-up culture works, but it was also kind of liberating. By then I was on testosterone, so the way my sexuality was operating was a little bit different. Before testosterone, if I had sex with someone, I’d be immediately attached to them and want something, even if they were a very bad partner. It got me into a lot of trouble when I was younger. I’d get attached to people who were not there for me. Now I’m in this place where I can have a hookup and not be crushed if he doesn’t call back or whatever. If he just fucks off. Seeing that change has been interesting.
SFK
That specific thing has been at the forefront of my mind. I upped my testosterone dose recently, and I’ve been getting into gender politics with myself every day of my life.
TJC
I think The Lost Art of the Future is my first video as a trans gay or bisexual, more specifically, man. Because I made it so early in my transition, my body hadn’t caught up at that point to where it is now. I keep changing my selfies on my profile pictures. The way I look keeps changing. It’s interesting to see the space that I was in when I watch it now.
SFK
Lost Art of the Future also resonated with me because as I started taking PrEP, I had all the thoughts that you were listing. When I started PrEP, I also started grieving, which was crazy. I was sad all the time, but the sadness was not brought on by the pills themselves, but more like the ideological impact of the pills.
TJC
I think I’ve finally gotten to a point with PrEP where I feel like my friends who did pass away would not be angry that I’m taking PrEP. I think they’d be like, “That’s cool that you get to go be a slut and not have to worry about this disease that we were all worried about for decades.” Three decades of HIV/AIDS being such a big thing in our communities and others, and suddenly a game changer happens, and sex is not so scary again. I feel fortunate I was able to get on PrEP, but also being sad for skipping all the years where I could have been having trans bi sex.
SFK
I reached a similar conclusion actually after watching Lost Art of the Future. I was carrying that grief and upset about not just the people who have passed on, but also those who I’ve known in recent years who are queer men, as well as those who aren’t necessarily men but are AMAB [assigned male at birth] and navigated the world as bi or gay men back in the day that have been finally coming out and saying, “Yeah, I just pretended because I didn’t want to die.” That is in itself a kind of death. I’ve been feeling the weight of these men in my life, men who helped raise me, saying, “I just decided to be straight, and I was miserable, but I am so happy because I got my children now.” Thank goodness that these people are alive, but I’ve been having these interesting conversations with them about all the ways that they shut themselves down out of survival. As I watched Lost Art of the Future, I began to say to myself, Yeah, okay, I get to not die. That’s kind of a blessing and cool that today we get to be sluts. It’s a good thing. It’s a net win.
TJC
Yeah.
SFK
I want to close by asking about the futurity of your projects. Without giving too much away, what do you want to do next? What do you want to make moving forward? Also, congratulations on the top surgery. I fucking love top surgery. Now that you’ve gone through these beautiful benchmarks, and you continue to go through these beautiful benchmarks, what is your future? What do you feel? What do you feel is next?
TJC
In terms of projects, I’m trying to work on a trilogy about trans climate migrants. Climate change is a big issue, but also it feels like people are distracting us from the climate change issue by trying to put in these draconian laws around trans people and trans health. I wanted to combine the two and talk about what it means that people are having to move communities right now because of climate disasters. How different is that when you’re trans and having to do that. I’m also trying to finish a video game, which is my last lesbian project. There are trans men in it, and you have conversations with them, and that’s how you find out who they are. It’s a video game about ethics. You’re supposed to feed, fall in love, and get to your crypt before the sun comes up. However, you can kill people, but it’s a bad idea because there’s ramifications if you kill people, and there’s only one person you can actually feed from. As the player, you have to have a whole bunch of conversations to get consent and find out who that person is. There is also a BDSM club in there. It’s just a very cute game.
SFK
I was super excited to talk to you because I am also disabled. You alluded to something similar in one of your pieces, where you would talk about how your brain has its own medicine, but currently you also have to be on Western medicine in order to cope with the way things are.
SFK
I really felt a connection to that because I’m not normal, mentally. That has been something I’ve also been trying to navigate as well. I ask myself: How much of this do I honor, and how much of this do I have to control in order to make it in this paradigm in society? I’m looking at the work you are doing, and you are someone like me. It’s a representation I didn’t realize I needed because I had written off in my brain ever being represented. It was cool that your body of work has been the representation for me suddenly.
TJC
I love how many commonalities we have. I don’t drink beer, but if I was there [with Keahna], I would love to go for a non-alcoholic beer.
SFK
I’m also sober, but there’s this place in Bemidji, the border town. I’m enrolled in White Earth Ojibwe, and Bemidji borders three reservations. The town has this bar called Hard Times that I would go to. It was the only gay-ish bar. It’s not fully gay. It’s got a rainbow flag though in there, so all the gay people go there. I invented this non-alcoholic beverage that is ginger ale with little spritzes of mango and pineapple.
TJC
Oh, nice.
SFK
Yeah. So we could have that.▪︎
Experience Theo Jean Cuthand's work at the Walker as part of Transmission Shorts Program on May 11, 2024 as well as download their video game Carmilla the Lonely here.
Theo Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 he has been making short experimental videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and gender and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally. His work has also exhibited at galleries including the MOMA in NYC, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He completed his BFA majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and his Masters of Arts in Media Production at Ryerson University in 2015. He has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 he won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. He is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.
Shaawan Francis Keahna is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. His first chapbook of poetry and comics, “Mayday,” was published by Bottlecap Press in June of 2023. His visual work has been shown at Watermark Art Center, the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, and the Gizhiigen Arts Incubator. Keahna lives in Baltimore.