Clay Camaro + Queer Futures: Music & Films!

Clay Camero,  also known as Caethua, Cammo, Ancestral Diet and Sports, believes in the power of music bringing communities together and has been writing songs and making sounds since she was 9. and playing in underground bands since she was 14.  She started Saxwand Records when she was 22, and has released over 10 albums, on Saxwand and through other labels over the years including Foxy Digitalis, Goaty Tapes, Preservation, Psychic Sounds, Blue Sanct, Bathetic, Nightpeople, WaterWing, Turned Word, Feedingtube and more. Clay's next solo album BioPsychoSocial, debuts in Spring 2024. She is also reviving an old church from 1837 to make it a venue, community arts space and recording studio to help preserve the rich tradition of songwriting in rural Maine. In 2018, she founded Project Freewill, a non-profit organization to help give the underserved a voice and to heal and unite community through the power of the arts. Clay is also currently working on her Master's in Counseling Psychology with a Creative Arts Focus at the University of Maine Farmington to help folks heal trauma through making music and art. 

The QUEER FUTURES series centers joy and connection to radically imagine future visions of queer life. Four short films explore fat beauty and liberation, gender-affirming healthcare, nonbinary siblinghood in ballroom culture, and the anonymous connections of a decades-old LGBTQ hotline.

Featuring the Short Films:

HOW TO CARRY WATER: This punk rock fairytale doubles as a portrait of Shoog McDaniel — a fat, queer, and disabled photographer working in and around northern Florida’s vast network of freshwater springs, the state’s source of precious drinking water. Bringing Shoog’s photography to life, the film immerses audiences in a world of fat beauty and liberation, one in which marginalized bodies — including bodies of water — are sacred.

THE SCRIPT: Blending personal interviews with dramatized genre recreations, THE SCRIPT explores the complicated relationship between trans and nonbinary communities and medical providers regarding gender affirming care. With a playful approach toward experimentation, the film invites its participants and its audience to examine the limits of language and the nature of performance in building safe and affirming futures.

MnM is an exuberant portrait of chosen sisters Mermaid and Milan, two emerging runway divas in the drag ballroom community. Celebrating their joy, siblinghood, and unapologetic personas, the film explores the power and beauty of being nonbinary in a community that prizes gender ‘realness.’

THE CALLERS combines anonymous documentary testimony with imagined creative scenes to tell the story of those who have called the oldest queer support line in the UK, seeking guidance on everything from where to find the nearest leather club to how to come out, start a family or mend a broken heart. The film is a love letter to queer memory and possibility, LGBTQ+ community and care, and the power of collective imagination to create the lives we dream of.