DYKE TV: THE EARLY YEARS (1990-1994)

“Welcome to DYKE TV: Television to Incite, Subvert, Provoke & Organise.”

Bold, raw, and unapologetically dyke: DYKE TV shook up American cable television in the 1990s. Founded in 1993 by activists, artists, and filmmakers Ana María Simo, Linda Chapman, and Mary Patierno, the groundbreaking weekly programme fused grassroots cultural criticism and community-organising.

Created to empower lesbians and increase the visibility of lesbian issues, culture, and community, DYKE TV aired weekly across the United States from 1993 to 2005, reaching more than 6.5 million households. Beyond television, it screened at festivals across the U.S. and abroad, establishing itself as a vital platform for queer voices and activism. Featuring appearances by Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Hammer, Leslie Feinberg, Urvashi Vaid, and many others, DYKE TV: The Early Years is both an essential document of queer activism and an alternative history of lesbian cinema and culture.

This special compilation revisits the programme’s formative years through the eyes of London-based curators May Ziadé, a French-Lebanese filmmaker and film worker, and Antonia Luxem, an English artist-filmmaker, performer, writer, and painter. Together, they run the production company Other People’s Films and have spent the past year excavating the archives of the New York-based cable programme. Drawn from hundreds of hours of footage, they distilled an exhilarating 71-minute compilation: a celebratory journey through lesbian life, political struggle, desire, pleasure, and the infamous “bed death”.

As Ziadé and Luxem put it: “DYKE TV is both a dyke activism history lesson and a lesbian cinema history because of all the major figures who passed through it. But it also feels incredibly close to the current political moment. The parallels are really striking.”

The compilation presents a portrait of a community creating its own images, stories, and future. More than thirty years later, these stories, debates, and forms of resistance remain as urgent as ever. It becomes a time capsule that pays tribute to our dyke predecessors while also acting as a call to action in the present.

This screening is part of BOSCINEMA: an eclectic film programme that focuses on reflection and social engagement. While the world is burning, we build a cinephile community rooted in solidarity. This summer, Het Bos and De Cinema present four open-air screenings in what is perhaps Antwerp’s cosiest courtyard: the BOStuin.