Some films seem to find you when you’re finally ready for them.

In 2021, I spoke with filmmaker and writer Guinevere Turner about her memoir, When the World Didn’t End, and our conversation naturally drifted to her groundbreaking work in queer cinema, including her films “Go Fish” and “The Watermelon Woman.” During that interview, she mentioned a film I had somehow never seen: “By Hook or By Crook.” I immediately wanted to track it down, but for years it remained frustratingly elusive.

Then, in one of those strange moments of synchronicity years later, I was talking on Patti Vasquez’s Heartland Signal radio show about our magazine and our film festival for women and gender-expansive filmmakers when a caller—an elderly woman clearly moved by the experience of watching it—asked if I had ever seen “By Hook or By Crook.” Once again, I had to answer, “Not yet, but I really want to.”

Fast forward to this year, when news broke that the film was receiving a 25th-anniversary 4K restoration. At last, I got the chance to see the film that had been recommended to me across years, conversations, and communities. It was worth the wait.

Few independent films have left as enduring a mark on queer cinema as “By Hook or By Crook.” Written, directed by, and starring Silas Howard (he/him), who identifies as trans-masculine and queer, and Harry Dodge (he/him), who identifies as a butch dyke and bulldagger, the film arrived at the dawn of the 21st century as something radically new: a fiercely authentic portrait of trans and butch life that refused to explain itself to mainstream audiences.

Premiering at Frameline in 2001 before becoming a breakout sensation at Sundance in 2002, “By Hook or By Crook” follows Shy (Howard), a gender-bending small-town dreamer, and Valentine (played by Dodge, using she/her pronouns for the character), a wisecracking adoptee searching for her birth mother, as they navigate friendship, survival, and chosen family on society’s margins. Shot guerrilla-style on Mini-DV and Super-8, the film helped pioneer a new wave of DIY queer filmmaking, earning Audience and Jury Awards at festivals including SXSW and Outfest before securing a theatrical release in 2003.

Part of what struck me most was its raw, handmade energy. The film embodies the DIY spirit that defined so much of independent filmmaking at the turn of the millennium. Working with cinematographer Ann T. Rossetti—whose work on “Go Fish” helped define the look of a generation of queer cinema—Howard and Dodge created a film that feels intimate, immediate, and deeply lived-in. Even now, twenty-five years later, it retains a freshness and authenticity that many contemporary films struggle to achieve.

Now digitally restored in 4K by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in partnership with Frameline, Outfest, Steakhaus Productions, and the Sundance Institute, “By Hook or By Crook” is ready to be discovered by a new generation. Its themes of gender, self-representation, friendship, chosen family, and what the filmmakers call “radical tenderness” remain as resonant today as they were in 2001.

I spoke with Howard and Dodge about meeting in San Francisco’s underground queer scene in the late 1980s, building a creative partnership through community organizing and performance art, making a film that trusted specificity over explanation, and why “By Hook or By Crook” continues to resonate with audiences a quarter-century after its debut.

How did you two meet? I believe it was around 1989. How did you come together, and how did your creative collaboration begin?

Harry Dodge (HD): We actually met in 1987. Because I had moved to San Francisco in 1985 and was working at Cafe Commons, this kind of dyke café in the Mission. Back then, you needed a gay guidebook to find anything because there was no internet. I was from the suburbs of Chicago, so I must have arrived with one of those guidebooks in hand.

I got a job at the café. It wasn’t actually owned by dykes—it was really just a neighborhood café—but it became a gathering place. Eventually Silas started working there too, and that’s how we met. It’s kind of weird and wonderful that we eventually opened a coffeehouse ourselves.

Silas Howard (SH): Part of it was that when I moved there, I wasn’t of legal drinking age. Getting into lesbian bars was tricky unless you had a fake ID. We were part of this in-between generation. We weren’t exactly gay or lesbian in the traditional sense—we were queer, we were punk, we were all these things emerging out of that era, shaped by the AIDS pandemic and everything happening around us.

We’d go see music we loved, but most of it was in straight spaces. Then we’d go to lesbian bars, but the music wasn’t always the right fit. We were kind of Goldilocks-ing our way through the scene, trying to find the place that felt right.

HD: Yeah, until we opened our own place.

There was so much happening underground. People were constantly making events, putting on shows, creating music, doing dance, making art. It was this multimedia, multifaceted community.

SH: It was also a really generous time. Before we opened our café, we were trying to create a dyke-only collective space. We put on a number of shows. I remember asking a bunch of bands to play benefits—bands that were mostly straight and couldn’t even really participate in the space otherwise—and they immediately said yes.

People were all-in back then. Even if you weren’t in the same camp, there was a lot of cross-pollination.

HD: Yeah. It was underground shit.

Let’s talk about how the movie came to be. Can you talk about your creative collaboration and your process of writing the script? How did the film get started?

HD: Let me set the scene.

We met, started trying to create this community space, and eventually opened the Bearded Lady coffeehouse. We ran it for a few years. Around the same time, Silas started touring with Tribe 8, the punk band, and I started doing evening-length performance pieces in spaces around the Bearded Lady.

There were a lot of performance venues back then, so we were both busy making things. Not long after we met, we’d already built this creative life together. A few years into running the café, we started asking ourselves: What do we want to do when we grow up? We couldn’t run a coffeehouse forever. Something else seemed to be on the horizon.

In my memory—and I don’t know if Silas remembers it this way—independent film was just starting to feel accessible. Suddenly it seemed like you could make a movie yourself and launch it into the mainstream. “Clerks” had just come out. So had films by Robert Rodriguez and Rose Troche. Those movies were influential.

We thought, “Let’s do that.” That was our big plan for becoming grown-ups.

SH: We were going to go from running a café, to hauling garbage as our interim job, to becoming movie stars and directors.

As for our writing process, one of the ways we worked was that Harry would be driving the ship at the keyboard while I’d be sitting behind him, eating snacks and talking nonstop. (laughing)

HD: To this day, I want to strangle people who eat behind me. It’s the one thing I physically can’t handle. It’s funny you’re reminding me that you used to do that.

Even now, I’d tell you: get in front of me. Just get in front of me.

SH: I’d be back there like a squirrel.

It turns out you make a lot of stuff when it’s before the internet—or at least before the internet became so pervasive. Though I don’t want to sound like a naysayer. People still make tons of things, and younger generations make phenomenal amounts of work.

HD: Absolutely. But there was more unstructured time in the day. None of it went to scrolling or email.

You had to walk everywhere. You’d spend half the day looking for your friend. You’d think, “Maybe they’re at that café,” and then walk a mile and a half to another coffeehouse. Then you’d leave a message on their answering machine and keep searching.

At least we had answering machines. (laughing)

I like that the film doesn’t define everything, especially sexuality. People are simply who they are. It reminds me of “Go Fish” in that way. You’re just showing people living their lives, having fun, struggling, getting by. Can you talk about that choice?

SH: I’ll jump in first.

Being in Tribe 8 was a great lesson in specificity. We were so queer that sometimes we confused ourselves. We’d contradict ourselves in songs. But we played primarily in straight, white, male punk spaces, and somehow that specificity became a passport.

The film works in a similar way. We had this luxury—and maybe that’s not quite the right word—of being part of a community that wasn’t constantly looking outward. We were facing each other. We took turns being the most important person in the room.

We spent enough time navel-gazing that we didn’t feel the need to explain ourselves. That was a real gift of the community we were part of and helped build.

HD: Two things come to mind.

First, there was this enormous underground community in San Francisco. There were so many queer people around that eventually you stopped tracking who was straight and who was gay. It just wasn’t interesting anymore.

There was plenty of mixing between communities. Yes, there were spaces created for specific groups and purposes, but there was also a lot of overlap.

There was this feeling of being fish in water—after a while you stop noticing the water. That abundance was a privilege, and it’s something I miss.

You weren’t just a dyke anymore. You were a person who did all these other interesting things. There were fifty things more interesting about you than your sexuality because sexuality had become a given.

We became these rich, three-dimensional people, all doing strange and exciting things. Nobody was making assumptions about what you were capable of based on how you looked.

That naturally found its way into the movie. We weren’t explaining ourselves to each other, so we didn’t feel the need to explain ourselves to the audience either.

There was also a conscious decision not to over-explain things so that people outside San Francisco could “understand” the movie. Instead, we trusted specificity. We relied on the conventions of cinematic storytelling just enough to orient people, while introducing them to characters they hadn’t really seen before.

Explaining narratives is a power dynamic.

SH: Exactly. “Explain yourself” is what you say to a child. It doesn’t actually connect people.

And it’s worth remembering that this community formed incredibly quickly. After we met at Cafe Commons, the Homocore movement was just beginning. Tom Jennings had mailed out a couple of zines, and suddenly people started showing up asking, “Where’s the scene?”

The answer was, “You’re the scene.”

It’s amazing how quickly it all happened.

I wanted to talk about some of the technical aspects of the film. It’s very raw, and I love that. You worked with the cinematographer from “Go Fish.” Can you talk about that collaboration and the DIY approach?

HD: Ann was the only person on set who had actually made a movie before. She knew so much about cinematography that we simply didn’t know.

There’s one scene where Valentine is breaking down, Shy comes in and says, “I can’t find Billie,” and then they move to the kitchen table and have the conversation about lobotomies.

That whole sequence was shot with natural light. The light was gorgeous, but it was changing fast. We had a choice: spend eight hours setting up artificial lights outside the windows or move quickly and take advantage of what we had.

I kept saying, “It doesn’t matter. It’ll be fine. If the performances are good, nobody will care.”

The light kept changing, and eventually it disappeared altogether. We moved into the kitchen—which wasn’t scripted—and simply followed the light.

Later, Ann pointed out what I’d been ignoring: performances aren’t everything. If one person is in shadow and then suddenly in bright light after a cut, the audience gets pulled out of the story.

SH: I would still argue for the Walter Murch school of editing: emotion first, everything else second.

I’m always saying continuity is for wimps. Obviously continuity matters, but emotional truth can overcome imperfect lighting or technical flaws.

Let’s talk about the film’s afterlife. It’s developed a cult audience, and now there’s a restoration. What’s it been like to watch the audience continue to grow?

HD: We’ve both been getting emails for the last twenty-five years from people who somehow found the movie and were deeply affected by it.

In my mind, the film never really went away.

I’m incredibly proud of that. I feel lucky that this community came together to make something that has had such staying power.

I think it comes from the specificity, the authenticity, and the fact that we don’t explain everything. I think it comes from the warmth of Silas’s and my friendship, which I believe made its way onto the screen.

People respond to that.

As for the restoration, people keep asking what we’ve lost by cleaning up the rough, pixelated look. Honestly, I’m happy. I’ve never felt the need to prove I’m a freak or a punk rocker. If the movie looks beautiful, that’s great.

I’m grateful to everyone who helped fund the restoration and to Frank Jaffe at Altered Innocence for helping bring it back out into the world.

That’s a big deal.

Silas, anything you’d like to add?

SH: It’s a real gift.

Halfway through making the film, I remember thinking, “Oh my God, we’ve completely screwed this up, and now we’re stuck.”

I like talking about that because it’s a feeling a lot of artists have when they’re making something they care about. The outcome is always out of your hands.

The fact that younger generations continue to connect with it means a lot.

Sometimes people come up to me who were born around the year the movie came out, and it still resonates with them. I think part of that is because the film is genuinely weird.

Film is a very conservative medium. It’s incredibly difficult to make something truly strange.

I’m proud of that. The movie gets screened somewhere interesting every few years, but this restoration feels especially significant.

For people seeing the film for the first time, what do you hope they take away from it?

SH: Radical tenderness.

HD: I was going to say the same thing.

Love. The feeling that love conquers all. Believe in yourself—and if you can’t, your friend will help you do it.

What’s interesting in the film is that Shy initially seems like the more together character, while Valentine appears to be the one who needs help. But that dynamic keeps shifting.

Valentine steals the wallet, returns it, and then finds himself overwhelmed by the intimacy and trust between these characters. Suddenly he’s realizing: Oh. Family. Chosen family. I’m loved. I’m seen.

The give-and-take keeps surprising you.

So yes: radical tenderness. Friendship. Chosen family. The power of social connection. The power of simply hanging out together.

“By Hook or By Crook” will open theatrically in NYC on June 12th and play Los Angeles on June 16th, and then expand to additional cities throughout the US, including Seattle, St. Louis, Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, and more. Digital and physical releases (DVD & Blu-Ray) will follow later this summer. More info: https://www.alteredinnocence.net/film/hook