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Howard weaves facets of her life into her films, which deal with family and friendship (and sometimes funerals and quirky automobiles). She portrays gender as fluid and complex but not the central focus. Regarding her own gender identity she says: “I kind of feel like, it's confusing to me, so why would I expect it to be any less confusing to the wider world, you know? That's the wonderful part; it's not really pin-downable.”
Howard tries to accurately depict aspects of her class background in her films and acknowledges the challenge of doing so without romanticizing. She moved around a lot as a child in Vermont, where she was raised by her father. They had to order oil for the heater, making winters especially cold.
Hardly anyone from her high school went to college: “Their parents would say, ‘Ten dollars for an SAT test? Forget it.'” The self-described dropout drug dealer thought college would be her ticket out, but she couldn't afford any of the schools she got into. So she stayed in Vermont then moved to San Francisco when she turned 18.
It was soon after arriving in California that Howard and two friends started the homocore group Tribe 8: “We kind of did it as a joke and then we got all caught up in it. And there was a lot of buzz then about queers playing punk music.”
The first time the band left San Francisco to tour cross-country they were worried about what they'd face outside their queer-friendly bubble. “We thought we'd need chicken wire, like Blues Brothers,” says Howard.
They played mostly straight, all-ages shows, where there'd find a lot of 14-year-old boys wearing Tribe 8 T-shirts. “But the gaystream people really didn't gravitate toward us because we were too obnoxious and noisy,” she says. “It wasn't till we played the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and got protested that we, oddly enough, won a bunch of homos over in that process.”
After years with the band, Howard logged a lot of stage time, but she had no formal acting experience when she made Crook, which she and Dodge star in. But she has loved acting all her life, always going on auditions for small movies and plays.
“I was one of the million butches they auditioned for Boys Don't Cry,” she says, “so it's really funny for me to be on the other side now, looking for that butch or trans actor that I really want to have play Billy.”
Howard is currently casting for her film about Tipton, a jazz musician in the '30s and '40s who married five different women and raised three children. When he died the coroner informed his family that he had been born female.
Howard and Landey skirt the typical reading of Tipton as a woman who had to pass as male in order to play jazz professionally. The film also isn't concerned with whether his wives knew. “I hope what our story does is make that a ridiculous question,” Howard says. “That doesn't really change that she knows who he is, because you get to know a person and how complex they are, and that's what matters.”
“I've always loved that story because people think, ‘Oh, look what he had to do.' But,” says Howard, “it's very current identity stuff, and it's always a timely subject.” Like By Hook Or By Crook, the film will take off from a position beyond questions of gender identity and sexuality, which Howard doesn't believe to be an interesting story in and of itself. “We all make up who we are anyway,” she says.
This approach is what makes Howard's films entertaining—as well as intellectually and emotionally engaging—without being preachy or didactic. She offers viewers a safe space for stepping outside their own experience and opening their minds to new ways of thinking. Regarding film in general, she says viewers “might go to watch something about someone they think is other than them,” she says, “then by the end see some commonality they might not have realized before.”
Exactly like You has a lot of potential to do this. “People might go in thinking, here's someone that fooled someone ,” she says, “and I hope that they would leave thinking, 'here's someone that was brave enough to live a larger truth.'” And Howard knows what that means.
