About this project

Over the past four years we've put everything we have into making this film because we really wanted people to see that transgender people actually do stuff besides be trans. Actually, a lot of them are brilliant, and we wanted to portray that in a way that speaks to anyone, through music.

Actor Slash Model, the band that Simon and Madsen are in, have from the beginning put any money made at shows or through CD sales into the Riot Acts project. With this last US tour for our new album "Hardly," through June and July 2011, we were hoping to finally finish up our last payments on Riot Acts credit cards. And then ALL of our merch money, vanished. Every cent we made from selling any of our new album is gone - along with our dreams of paying off Riot Acts with the funds made from the "Hardly" album. All we can surmise, is that someone else in the world desperately needed that money more than we did. And now we are asking for your help to raise it.

This is truly the homestretch, with only $1,000 to go to be completely debt free. We've decided to try out this platform to try to get there. It's all or nothing folks! Please give anything you can to finish this crucial project. It's importance to the LGBT community is paramount.

Riot Acts is a transfabulous rockumentary representing the multi-dimensional lives of transgender and gender variant musicians, through a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance, culminating with the notions that identities and bodies are undeniably political, and the trans experience isn’t always one of tragedy, but one of creativity and joy.

The individuals and bands featured in Riot Acts are celebrated as talented, inspiring, sexy, critical and fully three-dimensional in a manner that purposefully counters the vision of isolation and destitution frequently portrayed in mainstream media. As transpeople ourselves, we seek to capture trans and gender variant identities as complexly as they are embodied and performed, both on and off the stage.

Featured inteviewees include Ryka Aoki,Anderson Toone, Lipstick Conspiracy, Katastrophe, Trannysaurus Sex, Basic Fix, Ryder Richardson, Tough Tough Skin, Venus Demars, Adhamh Roland, Jessica Xavier, The Shondes, Novice Theory, The Degenerettes, Systyr Act in Boston, The Cliks, and Coyote Grace.