With the purchase of this black-and-white, 5 × 8 in. newswire photo of Jack Starr in 2017, I began my journey into creating my small but very cool QPA—Queer Photo Archive, which features an array of other gender-nonconforming, trans, and queer pioneers (please visit TSQ*Now at www.tsqnow.online to see more images and info). This particular photo also prompted me to embark on an ambitious exploration into the life of this amazing person. Days and nights of research (especially looking at newspaper accounts of the era) yielded a decades-long account of the life of a gender rebel who was repeatedly arrested over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s for wearing men's clothing. There were numerous aliases—Jacques Moret was the other most popular one, but Jack Starr was the most enduring. Jack's exploits unfolded primarily in Montana. In the repeated front-page accounts of the various arrests and trials, Jack comes...
Rebels, Criminals, Pioneers: Jack Starr and Friends in the QPA Queer Photo Archive
Jenni Olson, one of the world's leading experts on LGBT cinema history, is an independent writer and nonfiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. Her reflection on the last thirty years of LGBT film history appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema (2021). Jenni's work as a film historian includes the Lambda Award–nominated Queer Movie Poster Book (2005). She is a former codirector of the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, the oldest and largest queer film festival on the planet. She holds a BA in film studies from the University of Minnesota and is currently an independent consultant in marketing and digital film distribution. A 2018 MacDowell Fellow, Jenni is now in development on her third feature-length essay film, The Quiet World, and an essayistic memoir of the same name.
Jenni Olson; Rebels, Criminals, Pioneers: Jack Starr and Friends in the QPA Queer Photo Archive. TSQ 1 November 2021; 8 (4): 542–544. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9311158
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