By Kilian Melloy

For well over three and a half decades, ever since they met in 1989, Silas Howard and Harry Dodge have been friends and collaborators. They protested together as AIDS ravaged the queer community and they founded Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Café & Truckstop, a café where readings by the likes of Alison Bechdel and Kathy Acker took place, as well as performances by Joan Jett. Eventually, they co-authored the script, along with Dodge’s partner Stanya Kahn, for the film By Hook or By Crook, a groundbreaking film that told the story of two transmasculine outsiders.

Shy (Howard) heads to San Francisco after the house he’s been living in is repossessed, and dreams of starting a life of crime as a means of pushing back against a system rigged against people like himself. Valentine (Dodge, in a marvelously itchy performance) is already leading a life that takes him to the wrong side of the law. Seeing Valentine being beaten in the street, Shy intervenes. The two take their lumps, but they prevail, and a friendship is formed. Together with Valentine’s girlfriend Billie (Kahn), they form their own little band of outlaws, running small-time jobs and dreaming of something really big.

The film premiered at the 2001 edition of Frameline and quickly became a favorite of audiences at LGBTQ+ film festivals, raking in a number of awards along the way. After a limited theatrical release the film found a home on the Sundance Channel, followed by a release on DVD and VHS by Wolfe Video. Its fanbase grew, and so did its esteem — and its influence. Queer film historian Jenni Olson pushed for the film’s restoration, encouraging the filmmakers to pursue a grant from Sundance. The restored version saw its world premiere world premiere at the Academy Museum in 2023. Altered Innocence has now taken on the classic, bringing it back to theaters this month followed by release on VOD, DVD, and Blu-ray.

Howard and Dodge, meantime, have remained in demand. Howard has continued directing features (among them 2018’s Darby and the Dead) as well as numerous TV shows, including episodes of Pose, This is Us, Transparent, The Fosters, Tales of the City, and Boots. Dodge, a successful visual artist, teaching at California Institute of the Arts. His 2020 nonfiction book My Meteorite: or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing has garnered international acclaim, and he’s now in the process of writing a novel.

The two joined QulturVultur for a Zoom call in which they discussed the film, its influences, and the impact it’s had on their lives — and the lives of many others.

QulturVultur: By Hook or By Crook was a groundbreaking film when it came out in 2001. I can only think of one movie from around that time, Boys Don’t Cry, that talks about trans masculine characters, and I can’t really think of anything since then. You see more about trans women in movies and TV shows.

Silas Howard: It’s funny you should mention that, because Harry and I both have our auditions for Boys Don’t Cry at the Motion Picture Academy Museum, right before Hillary Swank. We both tried out for that, and they show our crazy, terrible, homespun auditions every day. It’s pretty funny. It’s been up for, I don’t know, four years, but it’s kind of gold. It has Boys Don’t Cry, it has Boys in the Hood, it has Midnight Cowboy right before us, which couldn’t be better, because that was one of our main influences.

QulturVultur: By Hook or By Crook is being described as a movie about brotherhood.

Silas Howard: I do think of it as a love story about friendship, which I’ve had in other movies I’ve made. Friendships are how so many of us survive, whatever community you’re part of.

Harry Dodge: I would call it a movie about friendship more than about brotherhood, but if our movie is about brotherhood — and it may be — then it would be expanding or sort of problematizing the idea of brotherhood and all the different things that that could mean, especially in America, where there’s certain kinds of weird expectations that come along with masculinity. I think that there’s something about the friendship between Valentine and Shy, or even the friendship between [the characters] in Midnight Cowboy, where there’s a kind of tenderness and a kind of lightness of being that circulates between the characters and redefines what friendship is.

Silas Howard: We think of our movie as having a radical tenderness — like, the power of that. As someone who looked like a boy most of my life, so was passing intermittently, once I passed full time I was struck by how much performativity is happening between men, especially straight, white-collar guys. There’s a love between them like no other love I’ve ever seen, and there’s a sort of trust in each other’s decisions, but there’s also this performing for each other. It gave me both surprise and frustration [to see] we’re all performing ourselves. Individually we have these parts of ourselves, and then we have these parts of ourselves in society, and I think that’s where, hopefully, movies can model different things.

QulturVultur: I’ve been told by trans women about how much social capital they feel they lost when they went full time presenting as women. Did you feel you had gained a lot of social capital presenting as a man?

Silas Howard: I did, absolutely. I have a friend of mine who would direct episodes [of the same shows I did], we did three different shows together, and she would come in right after me, and I could see the difference right away. Because I transitioned so late in life, that privilege was not something I wore like loose clothing. I always out myself on every job. It feels important because it’s who I am, especially being white and masculine-presenting. When I transitioned my dad was very accepting, but he was like, “Oh, maybe now you’ll make it in Hollywood.” At first I thought, “That’s so fucked up,” but then the second thought was, “Oh my god, that’s probably actually true.”

I think with trans people we hit the intersection of privilege so much; depending on your race, your class, and the gender you’re transitioning to, or coming home to, you either watch your power dissipate, or watch your power grow. With trans women, the more makeup you have, the less you’re listened to. If you’re a Black trans guy, you watch yourself become [viewed as] a predator on the streets. There’s so many ways that we are an interesting case study in all the cracks in the facade of our society, because we witness them in real time.

QulturVultur: You co-wrote, co-produced, and co-directed By Hook or By Crook, as well as starring in the film. Did you know from the start you needed to play Shy and Valentine yourselves?

Harry Dodge: I think for both Silas and I there was a sort of long-standing life dream of being actors, and there was the fact that in Hollywood, in mainstream media especially, there was not a lot of call for sort of tomboy characters, or however you want to name what we were at the time. There were a few roles, which is great, but not many. Part of what we were doing when we started writing the movie was trying to write roles for ourselves and make our own dreams come true. We also wanted to be in charge of the movie. There were a few people who were trying to talk us out of directing it, and they were like, “You can’t do both because it’s the first time for you,” and blah blah blah, and I was like, “No, we can do this” — and boy, did we make the right choice.

Silas Howard: There are very few people that could do what Harry did as Valentine, and that was coming from his long-standing work theatrically and the shows that he built. It was one thing that people challenged us in the reading of the script — like, “This is not the way movie language is done.” I think we both decided that that was a place we would be willing to fail on, if it was going to be failure, but to explore language in a different way. That’s really about Harry’s performance, which is singular in my mind, and very few people could pull off.

QulturVultur: This has been an influential and beloved movie for a quarter century. What have you been hearing across those decades, and are you starting to hear more now that the film is coming out in a restored edition?

Harry Dodge: I’ve been hearing a lot of the same stuff, which is, “I saw this movie, and it helped me.” Like, “I was in the middle of some small town in America, and it just happened to come my way,” or, “It used to play on Sundance Channel a few times a week for the first few years.” I really think a lot of young, butch people and trans people saw it and they were, like, “What? What?!” So, they would write to us. I’ve been getting 20 emails [a day] for 25 years. People come up to me at, like, an art gallery opening, or the at the café in my neighborhood, or in the park, and a lot of them are younger, and they’ll say how much it impacted them. One person told me, “I saw it in high school, and it rewired my brain.” It’s the biggest honor. I always say this movie didn’t make us money per se. It’s still like we’re digging into our pockets, but it’s a different kind of currency, which is the impact that it’s had on people, and people that are not even in the LGBTQAI community. I don’t think I’ve ever since had that much freedom to tell a story that I want to tell.

For more on the restored edition of By Hook or By Crook, follow this link.