In 2019 I was working in a shopping centre in Kent, selling bath bombs to bratty thirteen-year-olds while flashing fresh 3-for-2 Lovisa earrings and a bleached blonde bowl cut. Inside, though, my heart throbbed to the synth line of Smalltown Boy, restless and insistent. I itched to be more than a twink, to leave my huns-in-arms behind for the body of the city and solve the mysteries of my own.

I went looking for people with a certain swish, some shimmer of recognition that might free me from suburban solitude. I began talking to a queer online and soon found myself travelling to London each week to see them. Over cheap cappuccinos we admitted that we both felt the ache of gender dysphoria. That summer unfolded in long conversations, meandering walks, and languid bedroom afternoons.

One afternoon, they opened their MacBook and cued up a YouTube video. A granular picture showed a striking femme in a bleach blonde wig and big beautiful lips in soft focus. They sat in the centre of a bright blue room with a distinct futurist aesthetic, that warm hue of millennium optimism. They twirled and opened their long legs around a white swivel chair, snarling with a Liverpudlian drawl, ‘come and have a look at my vagina’. My friend casually remarked ‘she’s trans, I know it’ as they applied their mascara. I nodded, feigning nonchalance but something electric passed through me, recognition, jealousy, possibility, hunger. A glitch in the Matrix, if you will. The distance between me and the LCD screen collapsed. Across the decade-and-a-half between ’06 to ’19, Pete Burns and I seemed to reach for one another. The past became present, and maybe everything I knew was wrong.

Instead of researching hormones or speaking to a GP, I followed that charge into the archive. I fell down YouTube rabbit holes and Facebook gossip threads devoted to Pete Burns. Rather than simple nostalgia, this began to feed a yearning: through analogue fuzz and commercial breaks, through a 2009 appearance on GMTV’s Lorraine where Pete presents his facial feminisation as a way to reconnect with a past life. The clip was more degraded than it would’ve been on the original transmission. Its scars and fractures felt like finding a buried treasure. Slowly obsession would become methodology; watching was a way of imagining.

Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner’s Tgirls Make Music (2026) opens on a stack of videotapes labelled ‘Channel 6 Archive June ’03’. An old CRT is switched on, a hand opens up a bright pink DVD case and slides the DVD into the player. We are watching the pilot of Tgirls Make Music, produced by the (fictitious) T4T Network.

Shot on Digital8 and Hi8 camcorder, the film is steeped in a nostalgia of the 2000s: often purposefully British to evoke a time before the demise of monoculture and the birth of a more fractured media landscape of global streaming services and algorithmic social media. Tirls Make Music evokes traditional media programmes akin to Pop World or MTV’s Fanatic, complete with transitions for ad-breaks and idents mimicking Adult Swim and Nickelodeon. Unlike the historical tabloid landscape of the era, one of sensationalisation and fetishisation as seen in Sky1’s There’s Something About Miriam, the programme that Lucy imagines platforms “Tgirl” musicians and, in doing so, attempts to empower rather than traumatise.

The use of the term “Tgirl” is a distinctly early aughts term. In an era of playboy bunnies and lads mags, “Tgirl” was a porn category. It’s interesting to see this term being reclaimed by both my archival project, tgirlsonfilm, and Lucy’s work, specifically at a time when transgender pornography is more popular than ever: PornHub reports it as the second most-watched category of 2025. Lucy and I are both led by a fascination with trans women on screen and the histories of their marginalisation. We spent most of our childhoods in the 2000s and it’s unsurprising that we have both sought grounding in either finding, or creating, traces of trans culture in the noughties Britain of our childhoods.This is often found in derided low-culture objects like Celebrity Big Brother or, if it exists at all, languishing in an institutional collection or lost to dead hyperlinks. Lucy’s film is presented as a pilot that was never picked up. Ann Cvetkovich states that ‘to love the wrong kind of objects is to be queer’: so the compulsion to collect them is ‘motivated by a desire to create alternative histories or genealogies of queer lives’.[1]

Artists play with the aesthetics of their youth. Nostalgia cycles every twenty years. Queer artists are no stranger to this: see John Waters parodying fifties ‘women’s pictures’, or Lady Bunny’s Wigstock festival in the early nineties. However, in the past decades, this usage of childhood nostalgia has become complicated and compressed: as Simon Reynolds says, ‘never [has there] been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artefacts of its own immediate past.’[2] A generation has grown up chronically online. In the words of htmljones in Tgirls Make Music,‘my brain has been rotted by the internet since I was young’.This has flattened history and warped cultural nostalgia, since all cultural production is theoretically available a scroll or swipe away. This temporal blending is evident in Lucy’s film, which merges “traditional”, TV-inspired idents, with “new media” internet memes spanning 2006 to 2025. Tgirls Make Music self-consciously gestures toward a long tradition of queer and community-made media, aesthetically situating its digital collage within a broader history of grassroots cultural production.

In the early 1990s, as handheld video technology became cheaper and more accessible, queer artists began evolving DIY paper zine culture into video zines. These works emerged in response to mainstream media, which had spent the previous decade misrepresenting or ignoring the AIDS crisis and pushing queerphobic narratives. Seizing the opportunity to challenge this exclusion, queer artists created their own media to counter, critique, and parody dominant representations. In the United States, Black intersex artist Vaginal Davis took to the streets with her “terrorist drag”, and collaborated with Rick Castro to film two issues of Fertile La Toyah Jackson. The videos featured interviews with Ron Athey and RuPaul, and drag-queen skits like Street Walker Fashions which sees Vaginal co-opt the red carpet interview format that adores the skinny, white and wealthy, and instead celebrates and interviews low-income sex workers of colour. Similar methods were used in the UK with POUT, a lesbian and gay video magazine created by a collective of artists and activists from OutRage!. Inspired by a cut-and-paste aesthetic of scratch video and Gay Sweatshop Theatre, the videos included queer family home movies, protest footage, and television parodies such as a parody of the ITV game show Supermarket Sweep called Hypermarket Hump. The skit sees four gay men of colour cruise the supermarket aisles, adoring and exploring each other's bodies. Yet trans artists often struggled for access: Vaginal relied on Castro, and POUT was predominantly a cisgender collective.

It is important to note that trans-made work was not often platformed or supported by the wider gay and lesbian movement of the early 90s. Lucy’s digital8 camera was used by queers in the 90s by necessity, the result of poor material conditions leading to DIY as the only option. This is observable in the work of 90s Canadian transexual video artist Mirha-Soeil Ross, who directed the video Gender Troublemakers which, in the past few years, has been recirculated on social media and therefore seen a surge in popularity. The video sees two trans dykes talking about their relationship while critiquing the wider gay movement. Viviane Namaste, in her essay Beyond Image

Content, charts how the video was excluded from gay and lesbian film festivals and so led to the creation of the transexual film festival Counting Past 2 in 1997. Namaste reports that the films were ‘not very polished on a technical level’, but this was encouraged because ‘to impose professional standards of the art world on all its submission entries, the result would be one that excludes most transsexual voices’.[3] That same year, trans film festivals were launched in London and San Francisco.

These queer artists’ ability to express themselves despite their economic and social marginalisation is what makes their work remarkable. The fuzz and the aesthetic is comforting and nostalgic, but aesthetic alone cannot liberate us. As I started to share trans feminine archival clips on instagram, I started to research into the wider historical context of their production. Often when we encounter these archival videos they are hosted on corporate websites, such as YouTube, which homogenises their historical context. This creates a blurring of historical specificity. This erosion of time, place and people, can create an intimacy like the one I felt with Pete Burns early in my transition. Yet ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.[4] The aesthetic arose from necessity, the need to express the reality of ourselves in spite of the violence of the dominant culture. Pete Burns got me started, but community got me on hormones. The nostalgia of bygone videos can comfort and empower, but we must remember to turn off the CRT and take to the streets to flourish.
 

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Jaye Hudson is a film programmer, trans historian and actor. She is also the founder of TGirlsOnFilm.
 

[1] Cvetkovich, A. (2014) ‘Photographing objects as queer archival practice’, in Brown, E.H. and Phu, T. (eds.) Feeling Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p.275.

[2] Reynolds, S. (2011) Retromania: Pop culture’s addiction to its own past. London: Faber and Faber 

[3] Namaste, V. (2005) ‘Beyond image content’, in Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on identity, institutions, and imperialism. Toronto: Women’s Press, pp. 45–68.

[4] Benjamin, W. (2008) ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Jennings, M.W., Doherty, B. and Levin, T.Y. (eds.) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 19–55.