Frameline returns to San Francisco this month with a rich lineup of features, shorts, documentaries, and episodics that is equally political and personal.
Showcasing 150 films from 40 countries at nine venues across San Francisco and Oakland over 11 days (June 18–28), the world’s longest-running and most prestigious LGBTQ+ film festival offers a vibrant spectrum of queer storytelling.
These films not only feel instantly relatable—tapping into the personal, emotional truths of identity, love, and struggle—but also speak powerfully to the community. They illuminate underrepresented experiences and histories, teaching audiences something new about the richness and complexity of queer life.
Three standout titles—Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, A Deeper Love: The Story of Miss Peppermint, and I’m Your Venus—illuminate different corners of queer life and legacy, refracting fame, gender, grief, and family through fiercely honest lenses.
Each film centers a beloved icon—Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien, drag star Miss Peppermint, and ballroom legend Venus Xtravaganza—but it’s the deeply personal perspectives of their chroniclers that give these stories their heat.
In Strange Journey, Richard’s son Linus pieces together the contradictions of a cult icon’s life and impact. A Deeper Love captures Miss Peppermint’s struggles and triumphs before and after reality TV. And in I’m Your Venus, three of Venus’ brothers fight for her legacy and justice.
The result, unfolding across three cities and decades of cultural memory, is a powerful trilogy of queer storytelling that doesn’t just showcase resilience, but insists on intimacy. These are stories of artists and siblings, of biological and chosen families, of the complicated love we carry for those who shape us.
STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR
Unfolding like a conversation across time, this film (whose June 25 Frameline screening is sold-out—though rush tickets may be available) is not built to explain the show’s creator, British-New Zealand actor and writer Richard O’Brien, but to hold him and a flamboyant, elusive, and deeply human being
For Linus, who attended the University of San Francisco, the journey toward Strange Journey started with a simple edit job.
“I was making a clip package for my dad of movies and TV shows he’d been in,” he says to 48hills. “And then I came across the YouTube video for ‘I’m Going Home.’ And it wasn’t until I read all the comments below that it kind of struck me. We always knew the impact it had on fans, but to see the comments one after another, saying it saved their lives, essentially, is remarkable.”
His father wrote 1973’s The Rocky Horror Show musical (later adapted for the screen as The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975) without fully understanding how deeply it would resonate, even in his own life.
The story follows a conservative newly engaged couple, Brad and Janet, who get a flat tire during a storm and seek help at a nearby castle. There, they meet Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a flamboyant, cross-dressing scientist who unveils his latest creation: Rocky, a physically perfect specimen of a man. As the night spirals into chaos, the castle becomes a stage for a bizarre, campy exploration of sexual freedom, science fiction, and glam rock.
“When it came out in 1973, my father didn’t understand his sexual identity or his gender, even,” says Linus. “And so he struggled with that a lot throughout the next 30 years. Around 2003 or so, he realized, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta stop pretending now.’”
Richard would come out as 70 percent man and 30 percent woman, and somewhere between gay and straight on the sexuality spectrum.
The film isn’t a traditional biopic; instead, it moves like a mixtape assembled from fragments of memory and myth. It’s a collage, a son’s love letter stitched from old clips, theatrical and cinematic footage, and a global community of fans.
Cameos from The Rocky Horror Picture Show actress Susan Sarandon and cultural heirs like Jack Black and Trixie Mattel lend sparkle, but the soul of the film is in the quieter moments of reckoning and repair.
“Rocky never set out to be anything,” Linus says. “My father loved rock ‘n’ roll, science fiction, and bodybuilding. And he just threw the whole kitchen sink into it. It was never meant to be anything more than that.”
Still, the film’s impact is impossible to overstate. The staged version continues to run in theaters worldwide, and its cinematic adaptation has remained a staple of midnight screenings. In its decades-long run, the movie, which turns 50 this year, has arguably offered a safe space to many grappling with gender and sexual identity, helping them find community and understanding.
“I can’t think of another work of art that has tangibly saved the lives of as many people as Rocky has,” says Linus. “Rocky is going to outlive everyone.”
With the film, Linus isn’t chasing resolution. Instead, he’s learning to see his father not just as a performer, but as a man shaped by the same need for expression that Rocky Horror crystallized.
“It would be nice to write a short book about my dad and family, and how it all came together,” he says. “I’ve even thought of a great title: Son of a Sweet Transvestite—but I haven’t sat down to put pen to paper yet.”
A DEEPER LOVE: THE STORY OF MISS PEPPERMINT
Miss Peppermint—Broadway star, activist, and the first out trans woman to compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race—opens up in this film (which screens at Frameline on June 26) like never before.
Filmmaker Oriel Pe’er captures her life in all its beauty, mess, and magic—not as a celebrity, but as a person surviving uncertainty, back in 2015, on the brink of being cast as a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race the following year.
The movie is not a portrait of fame, but of survival—of being publicly beloved while navigating the silent toll of being trans in America, supported by her coterie of trans girlfriends, including Laverne Cox and Mj Rodriguez.
The camera captures the budding star making breakfast, fixing her wig with glue, and navigating the difficulties of dating as a trans woman.
“First and foremost, I want people to learn that trans people are regular, everyday people,” Miss Peppermint tells 48hills. “I want people to see behind the curtain what it’s like, that it’s not all glitz and glamour.”
Going on Drag Race would change her life—but not overnight. The allure of television masked the reality of her behind-the-scenes sacrifice to compete on the show.
“I spent what I did not have,” she says. “I had to borrow thousands of dollars from friends and family. I collected money, raised money, and was able to acquire approximately $20,000 worth of items from friends and family to go.”
A Deeper Love exposes the grind of surviving in a world that loves drag as spectacle but undervalues the people beneath the wigs, including Miss Peppermint (even after she came in as runner-up to Sasha Velour on the wildly popular show).
“You’re trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for a surgery or rent, and you’re excited that you get to go to DragCon and hope that you leave with a few thousand dollars,” says Miss Peppermint. “You actually would have had more money in your bank account at the end of the day had you just stayed home.”
But her story is not without hope. Miss Peppermint recalls being cast in James Magruder and Jeff Whitty’s musical comedy Head Over Heels, featuring music and lyrics from The Go-Go’s catalog. Before making its Broadway debut, it had an out-of-town tryout at SF’s Curran Theatre in 2018.
During the six months she spent in San Francisco working on the show, she had an intense relationship with a person who was present, attentive, and proud to date a trans woman.
Some of the music she’s seen recording in A Deeper Love is inspired by this very romance.
“So he’s got a presence and San Francisco has a presence in the film, and it will always leave a mark on me,” she says.”I’m grateful for that relationship, and I’m thankful to San Francisco for providing it to me.”
I’M YOUR VENUS
A deeply personal portrait of Venus Xtravaganza—the trans ballroom icon from New Jersey best known from the 1990 cult documentary Paris Is Burning, whose life was cut short in 1988, screens at Frameline on June 22.
In the film, which shines a light on the ballroom scene from which Madonna tapped several of her backup dancers featured in the Truth or Dare rockumentary, Venus speaks candidly about wanting to make it as a model and eventually transition and live out her fairytale of being married in a church in white.
Feisty and fierce in other moments, she could deliver a read like nobody’s business.
“Touch this skin, darling,” she says in a scene captured in Paris is Burning. “Touch this skin, honey, touch ALL of this skin! Okay? You just can’t take it! You’re like an overgrown orangutan!”
In I’m Your Venus, the voices of Venus’s surviving brothers float over images of clubs, faded photos, and old holidays.
Her younger brother Louie Pellagatti, who calls Concord home, has spent decades honoring her. In this film, he and his brothers, John and Joey, tell Venus’ story on her terms.
What began as their investigation into her murder quickly grew into a quest to put together a complex picture of their sister.
“I believe in my heart that Venus was pulling a lot of strings,” Louie tells 48hills. “Because we wanted to find out who did this, but more importantly, I wanted to honor my sister.”
The crime was never solved, but the film isn’t ultimately about legal justice. It’s about putting Venus’s real name where it belongs: on her grave, in her story, and in the mouths of those who love her.
The trio, aided by members of Venus’ chosen ballroom family, the Xtravaganzas, and local attorneys and politicians, successfully changed her name on her death certificate and her headstone from her deadname to Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza. They were also able to have her grandmother’s home in New Jersey, where she resided in her final years, designated as a landmark.
The film also chronicles Louie’s recovery from drugs and alcohol, as well as his firm belief that Venus still guides him.
After moving to the Bay Area, he remembers hitting bottom in the early 2000s, unable to enter a detox program. Walking along the train tracks in South San Francisco, he was unsure if he had the wherewithal to keep going.
“I was suffering and afraid, so I prayed for direction from loved ones who were not with us anymore,” he says. “I felt Venus’s presence telling me to keep fighting. Soon, I’ll be sober for 24 years.”
After memorializing his sister with a tattoo of an X in a crown, Louie speaks not as a witness to tragedy, but also as a keeper of legacy—someone who understands that remembrance is a form of activism.
“She has made a profoundly positive impact on the world,” he says. “As long as I’m here, I must hold my head high and honor her, and say ‘Thank you.’”
FRAMELINE49 runs through June 28. For tickets and more info, go here.
