Dialogue/ Loving yourself as you would love another (2026), Matthew Judd, Video: 24min.

Dialogue/ loving yourself as you would love another is an interdisciplinary video poem that uses drag, poetry, and abstract movement to explore queer adolescence as a relationship of self-looking. The film, and corresponding poetry collection, scaffold a relationship between a primary figure - a young person navigating the challenges and joys of queer adolescence - and ‘the goddess of my mind’ - a mystical drag caricature who begins to visit the protagonist in dreams. Staging the queer coming of age narrative as a relationship between two worlds - the dream, and the limited, fleshy body - Dialogue/ reworks the common coming of age motifs of queer encounter, the grief of the gendered body, feelings of difference and alienation, rituals of transformation, confusing desires, and early sexual experiences through the gaze of a constant, otherworldly onlooker.

Conceptualised in November 2024, Dialogue/ was awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation at the start of 2025. Its abstract, nonlinear story is split into 6 poetry chapters composed of semi-autobiographical verse. Aesthetically, Dialogue/ utilises repetition to explore queerness as a mundanity, works with the visuals of early 2010s digital photography, and explores a wide range of embodied queer aesthetics: the American fag accent, queer bodily movement, and queer performative aesthetics broadly.

Queer coming-of-age narratives that centre LGBT identity often focus on the resolution of queer dissonance. Whether it be through a sexual relationship, a medical/social transition, coming out, or grappling with social difficulties, the queer coming-of-age narrative always displays the queer body in motion and never in stillness. Explored more thoroughly in the companion essay On Womnx Dreams - developed under the mentorship of Dr Kemi Adeyemi - Dialogue/ is built on the idea that queerness can not be born in isolation, but instead is maintained through constant, radical self-looking and public surveillance. By centring relationality, the unachievability of gendered dreams, and the aesthetics of surveillance, Dialogue/ asks viewers: how does the queer body look at itself? How can queerness be both immediate and mundane? And how can we understand fragmentation, dysphoria, and dreaming as creative, lewd methods of self-loving?