A prime mover in the increasingly established "new wave" of gay independent filmmaking, Vachon gained notice by producing two highly stylized and ambitious features: Todd Haynes' "Poison" (1990) and Tom Kalin's "Swoon" (1992). She has built a reputation for nurturing film projects that deal with American gay life as well as for working with first-time filmmakers from other media. One of the founders (with fellow Brown University alums Haynes and Barry Ellsworth) of Apparatus Productions in 1987, Vachon produced seven short films in five years. The most notorious of these was the first, Haynes'