Film and video- maker. Trained at Concordia, San Francisco State and UBC, versatile and prolific Montreal native Stagias is among the few of the Canadian queer cohort (along with Bociurkiw, Sutherland and Weissman) to have worked in all three Canadian metropoles, most recently Toronto. Beginning with his experimental student essay on queer slang Drag on a Fag (1992), transgender performance and disguise were perennial themes, whether in the short semi-documentary Femme (2001), in which a trannie hooker is filmed on Vancouver’s real mean streets and blows a john in his car, or in the ultra-sitcom episodes The Dress (2002) and The Elevator (2003) both starring Toronto’s irrepressible Lucy Ricardo-inspired drag queen stars “The B-Girlz.” A popular queer festival programmer was the ambitious narrative Out and About (1999), an absurdist road movie about four fey Vancouverites trying futilely to butch it up to cross the US border, and running into SM fantasy interference. Stagias’s frequent collaborator is Vancouver poet, playwright, performer and eroticist Michael V. Smith, whose enigmatic narration accompanies the recent Butch (2003), an experiment with “male drag,” multi-framed screens and the cyclical choreography of park cruising.