I didn’t look to these films for behaviours I wanted to emulate, and I didn’t aspire to mimic their forms of collective camaraderie; however, was there something to learn from these depictions? In the ways their semiotic baggage remains influential, and their aesthetic iconography contributes to queer reading? Perhaps it was their methods of inference from which I hoped to learn.

Ultimately, each film differentiates gang culture from the rest of the public, not just by association but by aestheticism. The leather-adorned biker gang of Scorpio Rising is replete with machismo. Shiny black hide wraps tightly around broad, bulky shoulders and thick, bulging thighs.

The Outsiders, set in a similar era, doesn’t deviate too much from this aesthetic; however, class economics informs its arguably more casual approach, trading leather for denim. Tightness is enforced by the cropped sleeves of stained shirts.

A Clockwork Orange offers the most radical aesthetic (perhaps an affordance of the science-fiction genre). White jumpsuits are adorned with diaper-size padded cups (for brawl protection), held up by white suspenders. Bookended by black combat boots and bowler hats, the droogs walk around swinging canes in a postmodernist pastiche of high-meets-low culture. Alex, the main character, dons an iconic false bottom lash on his right eye. A hellish and disturbing appropriation of vain feminine beauty, of play, paired with the gut-wrenching reality of his zealous need to implement terror.

In my research I dubbed these collective aesthetics “uniforms”: wardrobe and adornments that differentiate those within the group or gang culture from those outside of it, who occupy the space of the dominant culture.

The dilemma placed on me now: How to devise a uniform for this queer collective I wanted to portray—this “gang”? How will they perform this collectivity in public?

I still wanted to play into the notion of inference in both group and queer culture. It’d perhaps be too easy to play into gender-bending extremism, or too trite to boil down the dandelion metaphor to monochromatic yellow. This was not my goal.

I knew I wanted to create an outsider’s perspective of deemed intimidation. A dandelion simply exists. For all intents and purposes, it does absolutely nothing (except, perhaps, to asthma sufferers, to whom I apologize). Intimidation can come from the in-versus-out group dynamic, though not entirely. Numbers help, but the intimidation, the discomfort, needs to linger even as the collective whittles down by the end of a day.

I landed on photos, by Helmut Newton, from an Yves Saint Laurent campaign for Le Smoking, a women’s tuxedo suit. This campaign depicts a tall, slender woman in the street (smoking, obviously), hair slicked back completely, hand in pocket, contrapposto, existing in a mood somewhere between bored and casually menacing.

In other photos from this campaign, she is draped by a naked woman. They both stand in the street, somewhat like furniture—such passivity a typical pitfall of an exploitative fashion industry (feminist criticism of the depictions of women in fashion and media are welcome here). Aesthetically, though, the image plays so incredibly well into queerness. It can be read as a subtle play with gender politics (this tuxedo was heavily criticized upon its initial launch; Nan Kempner was famously turned away from a bar till she finally removed the pants and wore the blazer as a mini dress) with its lez-ploitative posing and its overall camp luxuriousness.

I looked to this ad as an aesthetic blueprint. As a femme person myself, I’ve never shied from wearing a good pantsuit. In fact, I wear them all the time. The silhouette of a suit on the femme body, for me, achieves not simply a donning of masculine architecture to buy into masculine power, but rather a re-appropriation of the so-called masculine form to highlight the power of femininity and the feminine shape.

I decided to limit the colour palette of our costume to black and white, aspirationally black-tie, resulting in an attempt at the “tuxedo.”

I held on to this uniform idea with confidence for a few reasons. Formal wear in general, let alone black-tie, is hardly the dominant style within current fashion. It’s the kind of wear that’s reserved for proms, weddings, and funerals—events that we’d all avoid if given the chance. (Oh, just me?)

This lack of ubiquity, paired with the reverence for its formality, would serve me well to—as the kids never say—stick out like a sore thumb. And given that my film was shot under the scorch of July and August, the cumbersome layers of black polyester were, indeed, eyebrow-raising.

The number of looks, glances, and even tracks-stopping interactions I received while shooting offered both relief and a welcome vote of confidence. Multiplying the lone oddity of my tuxedo-clad self, loitering in July, to group numbers, amplified its phenomenal “out-of-placeness” to the proper levels of passive threat and intimidation of in-versus-out cultural politics that I sought after.

In practice, this vision didn’t quite come together. Working with zero budget and with a crew of delightful volunteer performers (to whom I remain eternally grateful) meant the aesthetic compromise of what people themselves had available to bring.

In a sense, despite my totalitarian vision of uniformity, this brought about a further queering of my initial call to arms: a resistance simply to do as asked and a desire to collect and mutate in a hodgepodge mess of anti-glamour and an owning of failure.

The film follows this band of characters, as they, just like dandelions, simply exist. To dare to exist in public spaces. Together. Outwardly stylized. Uncompromising. Defiant.

This method of aestheticized loitering performatively appropriated the dandelion’s way of being. The call to arms (invitations to friends to participate) resulted in a
cross-pollinating technique in which friends from different walks of life would congregate at the same time. To convene, to commune. In some cases, friends
I had reached out to brought friends of their own to tag along. The resultant film also reads as a sort of recruitment video. Obtrusive text provokes and rouses the viewer, interspersed between footage with commanding words such as: “Cultivate,” “Resist,” “Thrive.”

A passage toward the middle of the film is overrun with manifesto quotations related to the culture of dandyism, an eighteenth-century British male subculture that prioritized the frivolous notions of appearance and a leisurely cult of personality, a comparison that only occurred to me during the process of editing the film.

Much of my work deals in both pairings of sight and sound, as well as iconographic aestheticism and self-mythologizing. To complete the film, I needed to arrange a sonic palette to complement the visual one.

In looking back to my early filmic inspirations, I found music was used quite expertly to create tonal moods and supplemental statements, whether that be the gauzy optimism of 60s pop in Scorpio Rising or the disturbing juxtaposition of classical music and irreverent violence in A Clockwork Orange.

I also looked to classical, orchestral music for its compositional floweriness and cultural outdatedness to complement the austerity and imbued queerness of our “uniform.” I sought to offset this as well with the flamboyant aggression and theatrical gender ambivalence of the glam rock era.

The film opens with the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, and ends with its last. The first movement oscillates between leisurely pastoral ambivalence and almost raucous violence, before concluding with a soaring, triumphant crescendo. Its last movement arranges elongated, barely audible strings being pulled like taffy, drifting off into space, into the void of the afterlife.

This is offset by the glam strut of David Bowie’s “Fashion” and Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2.” The former describes the goonish in-versus-out cultural politics I was playing into, while the latter illustrates a call and response of raucous male camaraderie and egoism, confident in its machismo and oblivious to its flamboyant gayness (not unlike the filmic gang depictions I describe above).

This somewhat cringey obliviousness to the camp failure of attempted glamour is a space in which I’ve decided to hole up and reside. I plant my roots with the understanding that my fabulousness will forever be unfitting, unwelcome, wrong, deviant, ugly.

I refuse to do otherwise. The social prescription remains whether or not you openly acknowledge that it colours you. Defiance to “be.” To spring up every year. To show your colours. To meet others and be together. Again, and again, and again. To ruffle the feathers of those who’d rather look out to a sea of green rectangles instead of the spottiness of yellow polka dots that signal new seasons of turnover and change.

To negotiate identity as weed or flower?

I remove myself from that negotiation.

Those may be your words, but they aren’t mine.

You’ll talk whether I stay present or not.

So I’ll remain here, and simply be.