office Issue 22 Launches During Paris Fashion Week

In late spring 2023, my partner, Ryan Luis Fuller, and I longed for a space where friends — and friends of friends — could watch queer independent and avant-garde films, followed by an open discussion. Think of a salon. It just happened to be our apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, which could fit only 10 to 15 people. And so the programming began.

Guerrilla in spirit, we forwent screening rights and licenses in favor of bottles of wine — and then more bottles of wine (thank you Gia Coppola) — and sometimes tequila, lots of it. It wasn’t until Halloween 2024 that we brought Cine outside our apartment and secured proper screening rights. The film was Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult classic Ganja & Hess. The venue was Los Angeles designer Kwame Adusei’s showroom. That night confirmed what we had suspected: the budding community we’d been slowly building desired a space like this as much as we did. And that desire speaks to a much larger cultural conversation. 

Over the last several years, as algorithms have replaced discernment and digital life has become the default, there’s been a collective yearning for community — real-life community. Cue the resurgence of the third space, or at least the ambition of one. “It’s nice to have something to do outside of the club, a place where we can gather as Black and Brown and queer folk,” Azha Ayanna Luckman shares with me over one of our standing matcha meetups. 

Supper clubs, film collectives, chess nights, and the gamut of community gatherings have proven that in-person connection remains vital, not only for connection itself, but for being seen, truly seen. Craving an intimate evening of curated bites? Asia White’s Suppa Club has you covered. Want to nerd out while stargazing, maybe with jazz playing in the background? Bobby Cabbagestalk’s Star Party Silverlake is the perfect place. Interested in discovering underseen Latino cinema? Mariana Silva’s El Cine is cultivating a vibrant community of moviegoers. And the list goes on.

There’s a hunger for connection. The challenge is being of service to your community, which requires resilience, care, and genuine passion, qualities that must undercut aesthetics, self-service, and optics.

After Cine Apartamento’s Ganja & Hess screening in the fall of 2024, our then-burgeoning cinema collective reached a turning point. In May 2025, Cine once again emerged from our apartment living room, this time for a curated evening of experimental short films by emerging queer filmmakers at Human Resources Los Angeles. It became a pivotal moment in how we would show up for our community, creating monthly nomadic programming, never compromising our vision of showcasing queer cinema. 

And the journey ensued. In September 2025, we partnered with the art and architecture nonprofit Materials & Applications to present Glances in Plain Sight, a short film program and archival video loop showcased alongside Strat Coffman and Adam Barrett Miller’s installation Trade Safe Chastity Box, an interactive architectural device that reimagines architectures of surveillance. In December, we premiered a restoration of Isao Fujisawa’s 1974 film Bye Bye Love at Now Instant. The new year brought us to Eastwood PAC for a rare screening of Patrik-Ian Polk’s hilariously relatable and deeply underseen 2000 debut feature, Punks. An instant audience favorite, it also cemented its place in my Letterboxd top four. 

Among the more traditional short film programs, art activations, and film screenings, we’ve been able to create programs rooted in community care and education. At the end of February, we fundraised for vendors impacted by ICE in collaboration with Koreatown's Rapid Response Network and the film collective Apparatus, screening Lizzie Borden’s 1983 feature Born in Flames. Another program that expanded the imagination of what we could create was Traces Between, a beautiful poetry night at Plot, where seven artists and writers responded to Shuli Huang’s short film Will You Look at Me, winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2022. And these are only some of the programs, to name a few. 

As we come off of celebrating our third anniversary, where scenes of friends dancing and watching Julián Hernández’s Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve, stay imprinted on my mind, I sit back and reflect not only on what we’ve been able to cultivate, but also on how the importance of community sits at the core for so many. Something AI can’t replicate or reproduce. 

It’s a feeling I return to often when thinking about queer cinema and the spaces it makes possible. For as long as queer people have sought one another out in darkened theaters, community has been woven into the experience of watching and sharing these stories. Creating space for queer voices has always felt inseparable from creating space for one another, especially when the frontlines of so many social and cultural movements have been shaped by the legacies of queer people across generations.

As I write this, our most recent program, which happened to coincide with Pride — a screening of the 1983 documentary Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts, followed by a conversation with curator, filmmaker, and archivist Semaj Peltier, founder of Films for Horses, and myself — has one central idea resting at the forefront of my mind: reclaiming the queer narrative. In an effort to become the authors of their own lived experiences, a collective of filmmakers came together to create a kaleidoscopic collage of interviews with straight bystanders on sexuality, accounts of queer life, and political imagery that juxtaposed their material realities with the rise of fascism under Margaret Thatcher. In the face of oppression, community prevailed. It’s a sentiment that echoes through every effort to forge a connection.

When you don’t feel seen or understood, the desire for community can become insatiable. While the internet has connected the world and given everyone access to one another, genuine, real-life interaction continues to become harder to find. Amid the noise and countless attempts to establish a connection online, showing up, even when it inconveniences you, remains one of the most powerful tools we have. Sometimes it can be as simple as discovering a queer film alongside friends and soon-to-be friends at Cine Apartamento.