From Advocate.com:

Event date: October 7, 2005 – October 13, 2005

Daniel Peddle’s documentary about New York’s butch lesbian subculture, The Aggressives, opens Friday, October 7, at the Quad Cinemas, 34 W. 13th St. in Manhattan. Peddle follows six women through prisons, marine barracks, ghettos, barbershops, bedrooms, and on the street, as they pass as men while defying any strict categorization. For showtimes and more information, visit www.QuadCinemas.com.

I previously posted about The Aggressives here.

Today’s New York Times featured this review:

In a novel, accomplished documentary about a subset of New York City lesbians, six women define themselves through their sensibilities and habits, and in so doing map out the many directions in which sexual orientation can take a person. Each woman is in the category called “aggressive,” but several modify the term further, reluctant to have their individual impulses listed under any label.

Daniel Peddle, directing his first feature-length film, spent five years recording these women, each with her own imaginative ways of telegraphing her butchness. Other, lesser documentaries have explored gay parenthood and sexual reassignment surgery, but these stories chart less drastic but equally dramatic journeys. Each woman declares her profound and hard-won peace with who she is, but many endure problems fitting it with society. The women’s personal histories include poignant episodes of broken relationships, family strains and even incarceration.

As she tones her muscles at a playground, Marquise carefully masks signals of her sex. She does biting exercises to keep her jaw line firm. She adopts baggy clothes and a close-cropped hairstyle. She uses tape and bandages to flatten her chest because femininity is decidedly not her thing. “That’s not the illusion that I want to give you,” she explains. “If I don’t have to see you every day, then why do you have to know me?”

Her girlfriend, however, knows her truth intimately, and admires Marquise’s thuggish disguise. Other women find love just as easily, and the audience is left to decide if the bond exists because of, or despite, the costumes. Another strutting woman, Rjai, favors men’s suits in her daily life, and as she is fitted for one, a fellow customer recognizes her from her appearance on Ricki Lake’s talk show. (The film includes a few clips of that show.) But RJ, as she is called, seems most empowered when showing off her ability to pass as a man in celebratory drag balls, where she wins applause and trophies for striding around in construction-worker gear, accented with the cinder block she balances on her shoulder.

When Mr. Peddle follows young Octavia to prison, we learn more about how power dynamics and sex acts take place within these relationships, and such descriptions will challenge even those who don’t consider themselves prim. Later, Marquise enlists in the military, which becomes a gripping episode of a woman gaining the strength to fight while worrying about new rules that may confine her. (She suggests that she may have to kill and that she may have to grow out her hair, and she hardly seems prepared for either.)

In the film’s briskly paced 72 minutes, any open-minded viewer will discover something about identity and about the comfort these women have obviously found in learning to be their unusual, unfettered selves.

What else ya got for me? This:

*Up against a stonewall
*New film to explore gay surf culture
*Author expelled for calling Potter ‘gay’
*Transsexual Lawyer Wins National Award
*In Too Deep: Lesbian Serial Killers
*Indiana Bill To Ban Lesbian Pregnancies Dropped