"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."



Classics from the Vault: Changing Attitudes toward Homosexuality (1982)
[Ebert Presents At The Movies]

"I have a great love of Film Noir. You give me a girl with shoulder
pads who's packin' a 44 and I'm happy."



Steve Hayes is the Tired Old Queen At The Movies
[Popnography, January 8, 2010]

At 56, actor and comedian Steve Hayes, who recently played "God" in The Big Gay Musical knows exactly what he is -- A Tired Old Queen. And he's not ashamed. In fact, he's even named his new YouTube series Tired Old Queen at the Movies.

Every Thursday Hayes delves into his obsessive knowledge of film and gives his viewers the behind-the-scenes scoop on some of Hollywood's most delicious stories. Since debuting at the end of October, he's already had over 10,000 hits and people are even throwing Tired Old Queen at the Movies parties.

So far some of the films Hayes has dished on are Stolen Life with Bette Davis and two Joan Crawford classics, Flamingo Road and The Damned Don't Cry. Now he's ready getting ready to tackle some of the campiest films from the '70s and of course the musicals!

[Continued here]

• Steve Hayes: Tired Old Queen at the Movies [YouTube]

Why Does Hollywood Hate Gay Sex?
[Daily Beast, January 4, 2012]

If you've seen any of the high-profile gay-themed movies from 2011 — from Beginners to J. Edgar — you may have noticed they have one thing in common: the gay sex takes place in the dark (or not at all). Ramin Setoodeh interviews actors, directors, and writers to find out why gay sex is the last taboo in Hollywood. ...

Gay sex is the last Hollywood taboo. When Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet as the first openly gay sitcom star in 1997 — and her fictional self followed suit — a parade of gay characters came after her. There was Will & Grace, and Carrie Bradshaw's Sex and the City sidekick, Stanford. In movies, the gay best friend became a staple, from My Best Friend's Wedding to Mean Girls.

Yet none of these characters do what gay men do. As Hollywood portrays it, the homosexual man is, astonishingly, sexless.

[Continued here]

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo (1981)

• The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies [IMDb]
• The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies [Wikipedia]
• The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies [Paperback Amazon.ca]
• The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality In The Movies [DVD Amazon.ca]

• Inside The Celluloid Closet: A Review Of Vito [Boy Culture, October 17, 2011]

Adrian and the Dance of the Seven Veils: The Story of An Unknown Camp Classic
[Keep The Lights On, September 2, 2011]

The story of Salome, the femme fatale who danced for the head of John the Baptist, has long been a source of fascination to scholars and artists. When Henry Arango saw a production of Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1965, his first thought was, "Hell, I could be Salome." In those days, Arango was one of the bright stars of the legendary East Village underground drag nightclub the Club 82 after emigrating from Castro's Cuba in 1956. Arango performed under the stage name "Adrian" and was always seeking inspiration for production numbers to entertain the highbrow crowds who would descend into the 4th Street lair (now the location of the Bijou Sex Theater) to watch the glamorous, show-stopping female impersonators. When the cast was booked into a show in Florida, Arango went to work on the Salome number and mentioned it to his friend, filmmaker Avery Willard. Willard thought the duo should make it into a film. Thus begat the one and only filmed collaboration between Arango and Willard, Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils, a 10-minute color film that remained in Arango's possession, unwatched until many, many years later when drag scholar Joe Jeffreys presented it for an admiring audience at one of his Drag Show Video Verite screenings. Director Ira Sachs and documentarian Cary Kehayan, who are working on In Search of Avery Willard, a documentary about the forgotten gay experimental filmmaker, headed to Arango's home in Astoria to talk about the film, Arango's friendship with Willard, and what it was like being a gay man in New York in the '50s and '60s.

[Continued here]

Different from the Others: The story of the earliest known gay film (1919)
[XTRA, February 27, 2012 ]

Histories of marginalized peoples always enumerate firsts. One such first occurred on May 24, 1919 in a theatre on Kanstrasse in Berlin, Germany. The occasion was the premiere of Ander[s] als die Andern (Different from the Others), which is very likely the first gay film.

The story of its creation begins earlier that year at a meeting of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee). The group was founded in 1897 by pioneering sexologist and grandfather of the Western gay liberation movement, Magnus Hirschfeld. It worked to promote homosexual rights through scientific method and for the repeal of Paragraph 175, Germany's anti-sodomy law.

"The aim of the Committee is research into homosexuality and allied variations, in their biological, medical, and ethnological significance as well as their legal, ethical, and humanitarian situation," Hirschfeld explained.

[Continued here]

• Different from the Others (1919) [IMDb]
• Different from the Others (1919) [Wikipedia]

Different From The Others (German: Anders als die Andern) is a German film produced during the Weimar Republic. It was first released in 1919 and stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel.

The story for Anders als die Andern was co-written by Richard Oswald and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld[1], who also had a small part in the film and partially funded the production through his Institute for Sexual Science, with the aim of presenting the story as a polemic against the then current laws under Germany's Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense.

BFI has footage of first known male-to-male television kiss — featuring Sean Connery
[Pink News, June 8, 2011]

TV researchers at the British Film Institute (BFI) have revealed they have footage of what is believed to be the first known male-to-male kiss on UK television featuring Sean Connery.

The tapes originally belonged to Public Broadcasting Service WNET New York, which broadcast them after they had been shown in the UK on BBC or ITV. In the scene, which appeared in the 1960 BBC drama Colombe, Connery kisses Richard Pasco, who plays his brother.

Connery's character suspects his brother is sleeping with his wife, played by Dorothy Tutin. In an attempt to understand what his brother has that he lacks, he kisses him.

[Continued here]

Why film censor allowed nude wrestling [in Women In Love] (1969)
[Telegraph, September 30, 2011]

Moral campaigners were outraged when it appeared in cinemas in 1969, the first time that male full-frontal nudity had been allowed on screen. More than 40 years on, it has emerged that the film-makers and censors were "in cahoots" to ensure that the scene was approved.

Ken Russell, the director, and Larry Kramer, the producer of the DH Lawrence adaptation, wooed the chief censor, John Trevelyan, by taking him out to lunch and offering to make him part of the "creative experience". Mr Trevelyan was shown the script at every stage and helped to shape the finished product, requesting that the homosexual overtones be "handled discreetly".

When he expressed doubt about the "clearly visible genitals" on display, Russell responded by offering to darken the shot. Mr Trevelyan agreed, and declared the film "brilliant".

The correspondence has been made public for the first time in a retrospective of landmark decisions by the British Board of Film Classification.

Linda Ruth Williams, a professor of film studies at the University of Southampton, said: "I think it needs to be remembered that this is only two years after sodomy for men over 21 was made legal in Britain. This was an extraordinary climate in which film-makers were in cahoots with censors from the outset."

[Continued here]

• Women in Love (1969) [IMDb]

Sebastian: "It was my fault for bringing you to Brideshead. Run away.
Run far away and don't ever look back."



Brideshead Revisited (2008) (the film) [Wikipedia]

Although he aspires to be an artist, middle class Charles Ryder is studying history at the University of Oxford, where he befriends wealthy Lord Sebastian Flyte, a flamboyant homosexual and alcoholic. Sebastian's family, the noble Marchmains, strongly disapprove of both proclivities. When Sebastian takes him home to visit his nanny, Charles is enthralled by the grandeur of the Marchmain family estate, known as Brideshead, and he is entranced by its residents, including the devout Lady Marchmain and her other children, Sebastian's elder brother Bridey and his younger sisters Julia and Cordelia.

When Lord Marchmain invites Sebastian and Julia to visit him and his mistress Cara in Venice, Lady Marchmain encourages Charles to accompany them in the hope he can be a positive influence on her son. Increasingly interested in Julia, Charles surreptitiously kisses her in a dark alley, unaware Sebastian is watching from the opposite side of the canal. Jealous of his attention to his sibling, Sebastian ends their friendship. On their return to England, Lady Marchmain makes it clear Charles cannot marry her daughter since he professes to be an atheist.

Sebastian's allowance is rescinded by his mother, who is concerned about his increasing alcoholism. During a visit to Brideshead, Ryder gives Sebastian money, which he uses to purchase alcohol. When he arrives drunk and improperly dressed at a ball celebrating Julia's engagement to Canadian Rex Mottram, Lady Marchmain blames Charles and tells him he no longer is welcome at Brideshead.

Sebastian flees to Morocco where, at the request of the now terminally ill Lady Marchmain, Charles finds him hospitalised. His plan to bring him home is disrupted when the doctor warns him Sebastian is too ill to travel.

[Continued here]

• Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945) a novel by Evelyn Waugh [Wikipedia]

• Brideshead Revisited (1981) (the TV serial) [Wikipedia]

Cruising (1980) [Wikipedia]

Cruising is a 1980 film directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino. The film is loosely based on the novel of the same name, by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker, about a 1970s New York City serial killer targeting gay men, in particular those associated with the S&M scene.

Poorly reviewed by critics, Cruising was a modest financial success, though the filming and promotion were dogged by gay rights protesters. The title is a play on words between 'cruising' in the sense of patrolling and 'cruising' in the sexual sense, used particularly by gay men.

[Continued here]

• Cruising (1980) [IMDb]

Felicia: "I hereby christen this budget Barbie camper... Priscilla, Queen of the Desert!"



The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) (the movie) [Wikipedia]

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a 1994 Australian comedy-drama film written and directed by Stephan Elliott. The plot is based on the journey of three drag queens who travel across the Australian Outback from Sydney to Alice Springs in a tour bus that they have named "Priscilla", along the way encountering various different groups and individuals. The Adventures of Priscilla stars Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp as the three drag queens, one of whom is a heterosexual transwoman and the other two who are homosexuals. Containing elements of comedy, the film's title is a pun on the fact that in English speaking cultures, "queen" is a slang term for a male homosexual.

The film was noted for helping to bring Australian cinema to world attention, and for its sympathetic portrayal of LGBT individuals, helping to introduce LGBT themes to a mainstream audience. Alternately, the film has also been criticised for perceived racist and sexist stereotyping.

[Continued here]

• Film to Stage [Official website]

The potential for Priscilla to be adapted as a stage musical may now seem obvious - the costumes, the music, the 'numbers' were all there - but it took a UK screenwriter and producer, Allan Scott, to set the wheels in motion.

One day, Scott looked at The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert again and realised it contained many of the elements of any successful musical: Big characters, great comedy, a heart-warming central story, conflict, sets and costumes and, of course, the possibility of great music.

• Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical (2006) (the play) [Wikipedia]

The musical premiered in Australia in 2006 and has since gone on to play in New Zealand, the West End and Toronto. Its most recent production on Broadway debuted in 2011.

• Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical - I Will Survive [YouTube]
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - I Will Survive [YouTube]

Albin: "He's being taken from us, and we won't have any others."



La Cage aux Folles (1978) (the film) [Wikipedia]

Like the play, the film tells the story of a homosexual couple - Renato Baldi (Ugo Tognazzi), the manager of a Saint-Tropez nightclub featuring drag entertainment, and Albin Mougeotte (Michel Serrault), his star attraction - and the adventures that ensue when Renato's son, Laurent (Rémi Laurent), brings home his fiancée, Andrea (Luisa Maneri), and her ultra-conservative parents (Carmen Scarpitta and Michel Galabru) to meet them.

[Continued here]

• La Cage aux Folles (1983) (the musical) [Wikipedia]
• The Birdcage (1996) (the film) [Wikipedia]
• A Riotous 'La Cage aux Folles' Returns to Broadway (2010) [South Florida Gay News]

When "La Cage aux Folles" originally opened on Broadway in 1983, gay marriage was not on the horizon. At the time, Fierstein's book was considered groundbreaking for depicting a long-term gay relationship in all its domestic normalcy. In the nearly three decades since then, the idea of gay marriage is a reality, at least in some places.

Martha: "There's always been something wrong. Always, just as long as I can remember. But
I never knew what it was until all this happened."



The Children's Hour (1934) (the play) [Wikipedia]

The Children's Hour is a 1934 stage play written by Lillian Hellman. It is a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and to avoid being sent back she tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women's careers, relationships and lives.

[Continued here]

• The Children's Hour (1961) (the film) [Wikipedia]
• Michael Billington: The Children's Hour (2011) (the play) [The Guardian]

Michael: "Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when I didn't go around
announcing I was a faggot."



The Boys in the Band (1970) (the film) [Wikipedia]

The film is set in an Upper East Side apartment in New York City in the late 1960s. Michael (Kenneth Nelson), a Roman Catholic and recovering alcoholic, is preparing to host a birthday party for his friend Harold. His other friend Donald (Frederick Combs), a self-described underachiever who has moved from the city, arrives and helps Michael prepare. Alan (Peter White), an old and presumably straight college roommate from Georgetown of Michael's, calls with an urgent need to see Michael. Michael reluctantly agrees and invites him to his home.

One by one, the guests arrive. Emory (Cliff Gorman) is a stereotypical flamboyant interior decorator; Hank (Laurence Luckinbill), a soon-to-be-divorced schoolteacher, and Larry (Keith Prentice), a fashion photographer, are a couple, albeit one with monogamy issues; and Bernard (Reuben Greene) is an amiable black bookstore clerk. Alan calls again to inform Michael he isn't coming after all, and the party continues in a festive manner. However, Alan does appear unexpectedly and throws the gathering into turmoil.

[Continued here]

• The Boys in the Band (1968) (the play) [Wikipedia]
• David Finkle: The Boys in the Band: Still Offering a Gay Old Time (2010) (the play) [Huffington Post]

Matt Crowley's dark comedy, The Boys in the Band, opened at Manhattan's Theatre Four on April 14, 1968, little more than a year before the Stonewall Inn fracas that launched the modern-day equal-rights movement for homosexual men and women.

It's difficult, of course, to prove a direct connection between the two events, but it can certainly be said that Crowley's play about eight voluble gay men--and one declared straight--at a birthday party represented the Manhattan homosexual at last daring to speak his name insistently from a stage only 14 months before roaring it in the streets.

• 'Making the Boys' Examines Controversial Gay Play [Miller-McCune]

Mart Crowley was in a desperate situation. The screenplay he had written for 20th Century Fox was never produced, a TV pilot he scripted for a major star wasn't picked up by the network, and his agent had dropped him. Crowley needed something to write about that would get him back in the game.

Then Crowley read a New York Times article in which theater critic Stanley Kauffmann complained that three of America's most famous playwrights - Edward Albee, William Inge and Tennessee Williams - were gay, but refused to write about homosexuality. Crowley, gay himself, thought this was a good idea. After a friend took him to a party where he saw an assortment of gay men from all walks of life, he decided to write a play set in an apartment where the lead is having a birthday celebration.

• Fresh look at a gay cinema milestone [Sydney Star Observer, November 7, 2011]

Joe ('Josephine') to Daphne: "What are you afraid of? No one's asking you to have a baby!"



Some Like It Hot (1959) (the film) [Wikipedia]

Two struggling musicians, Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), witness what looks like the Saint Valentine's Day massacre of 1929. When the Chicago gangsters, led by 'Spats' Columbo (George Raft), see them, the duo flee for their lives. They escape and decide to leave town, taking a job that requires them to disguise themselves as women, playing in an all-girl musical band headed to Florida. Calling themselves Josephine and Geraldine (later Jerry changes his pseudonym to Daphne), they join the band and board a train. Joe and Jerry both become enamored of "Sugar Kane" (Marilyn Monroe), the band's vocalist and ukulele player, and struggle for her affection while maintaining their disguises.

In Florida, Joe woos Sugar by assuming a second disguise as a millionaire named "Junior", the heir to Shell Oil, while mimicking Cary Grant's voice. An actual millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), becomes enamored of Jerry in his Daphne guise. One night Osgood asks Daphne out to his yacht. Joe convinces Daphne to keep Osgood ashore while he goes on the yacht with Sugar. That night Osgood proposes to Daphne who, in a state of excitement, accepts, believing he can receive a large settlement from Osgood immediately following their wedding ceremony.

[Continued here]

• Some Like It Hot (1959) [Michael Thomson: BBC ]

Because we've grown used to seeing almost every possible subversion and set-up on screen, it's almost impossible to think back to 1959 and realise that, in mixing an affectionate view of transvestism with a light-hearted look at the mob, Billy Wilder was being daring in the extreme. And it was because he laced his own script with continuous charm and big fun that he was able to express those ideas in the mainstream.

"Sissyboy is, indeed, a big, loud mess of glitter, booze and cynical drag queens."



Sissyboy Director's Feature (2009) [Moving Pictures Network, March 6, 2009]

They've been called "gender terrorists," "performance art revolutionaries" and the "kind of drag queens your mother warned you about"; but underneath all of the spectacle of Portland's premiere shock-drag troupe Sissyboy is a group of amazingly insightful and sensitive individuals who have found an outlet for their self-expression that often leaves their audiences simultaneously delighted and horrified.

As a first-time director, I started this film as kind of an experiment. I had heard of Sissyboy - they were friends of a friend of mine and I'd been invited to their shows several times - but it wasn't until a Halloween weekend in 2006 that I actually experienced a Sissyboy performance first-hand. Admittedly, I didn't know what to think; it was loud and rude, but also sort of beautifully messy at the same time. Ten months later I attended another performance, and I remember being so intrigued, suddenly wanting to know more about them - what their lives were like, what it was that inspired them, and a myriad of other things.

[Continued here]

• Sissyboy a film by Katie Turinski [sissyboydoc.com]

Johnny to Omar: "A laundrette as big as the Ritz. Oh yes."



My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) [Wikipedia]

My Beautiful Laundrette is a 1985 British comedy-drama film directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. The story is set in London during the period when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, as shown through the complex-and often comical-relationships between members of the Asian and White communities. The plot tackles many polemical issues, such as homosexuality, racism, and Britain's economic and political policy during the 1980s.

[Continued here]

• My Beautiful Laundrette [IMDb]

• My Beautiful Laundrette [NPR, November 19, 2004]

A 'fellow taveller', so to speak



John Sayles [Wikipedia]

Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary (née Rausch), a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator. He was raised Catholic and took to labeling himself "a Catholic atheist". Both of Sayles's parents were of half-Irish descent. ...

In 1983, after the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a sympathetic story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman), Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship. Sayles used the money to partially fund the fantasy The Brother from Another Planet, a film about a black, three-toed slave who escapes from another planet and finds himself at home among the people of Harlem in New York City, largely because he is incapable of speaking.

[Continued here]

• The Big Picture: John Sayles [Mother Jones, May/June 1996]
• "A Moment in the Sun": An Extended Interview with Filmmaker/Author John Sayles [AlterNet, July 4, 2011]

Arnold: "You want to be a part of my life, I'm not editing out the parts you don't like."



Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (1981) (the play) [Wikipedia]

Torch Song Trilogy is a collection of three plays by Harvey Fierstein rendered in three acts: International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First! The story centers on Arnold Beckoff, a torch song-singing Jewish drag queen living in New York City in the late 1970 and 1980s. The four hour-plus play begins with a soliloquy in which he explains his cynical disillusionment with love.

Each act focuses on a different phase in Arnold's life. In the first, Arnold meets Ed, who is uncomfortable with his bisexuality. In the second, one year later, Arnold meets Alan, and the two settle down into a blissful existence that includes plans to adopt a child, until tragedy strikes. In the third, several years later, Arnold is a single father raising gay teenager David. Arnold is forced to deal with his mother's intolerance and disrespect when she visits from Florida. ...

The award-winning and popular work broke new ground in the theatre: "At the height of the post-Stonewall clone era, Harvey challenged both gay and straight audiences to champion an effeminate gay man's longings for love and family.

[Continued here]

• Torch Song Trilogy (1988) (the film) [Wikipedia]

Roger Ebert: Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (1997)
[Chicago Sun Times, November 21, 1997]

"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is a book that exists as a conspiracy between the author and the reader: John Berendt paints a portrait of a city so eccentric, so dripping with Southern Gothic weirdness, that it can't survive for long when it's removed from the life-support system of our imagination. Clint Eastwood's film is a determined attempt to be faithful to the book's spirit, but something ineffable is lost just by turning on the camera: Nothing we see can be as amazing as what we've imagined.

The book tells the story of a New York author who visits Savannah, Ga., is bewitched, and takes an apartment there. Gradually he meets the local fauna, including a gay antiques dealer, a piano bar owner of no fixed abode, a drag queen, a voodoo priestess, a man who keeps flies on leashes, a man who walks an invisible dog and the members of the Married Women's Card Club. The plot grows labyrinthine after the antiques dealer is charged with the murder of a young hustler.

Berendt introduces these people and tells their stories in a bemused, gossipy fashion; he's a natural storyteller who knows he has great stories to tell, and relishes the telling. He is not, however, really a major player in the book, and the movie makes a mistake by assigning its central role to a New York writer, now named John Kelso, through whose hands all of the action must pass.

[Continued here]

• Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (1997) [IMDb]
• "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil": the tour [Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 2010]

Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love (2005) [New York Times, December 9, 2005]

THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.

The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.

[Continued here]

• Brokeback Mountain [IMDb]
• The Brokeback Mountain Oscar Snub [After Elton, March 7, 2006]

Sunday night, Hollywood spent over three hours congratulating itself for its tolerance and progressiveness. But when it came to awarding the Best Picture, Hollywood's cowardly actions proved louder than its pretty words.

Two days after Crash's history-making upset over Brokeback, a debate rages over why the upset happened. Was it homophobia? Was Crash simply a better movie? Did the far right's attack on Hollywood's morals frighten the voters? Or did Brokeback simply peak too soon?

• Heath Ledger, Oscar nominated star of Brokeback Mountain, dies aged 28 [The Guardian, January 23, 2008]

According to the entertainment news website TMZ, paramedics tried to resuscitate him but he was pronounced dead at the scene. Prescription medicines were found in the room and police confirmed to Associated Press they were investigating a possible overdose, though there was no indication his death had been accidental or otherwise.

Ledger's death cut off at its prime an acting career that saw a young man emerge from Perth, Western Australia and rise to become one of the most sought after and accomplished actors of his generation. He started out in small roles in little known Australian independent movies, but reached wider attention in 1999 when he played a school heart-throb in 10 Things I Hate About You.

Stephen Fry finds that all is not harmonious within House of Boys (2009)
[Telegraph, July 21, 2011]

House of Boys is the film that reignited Stephen Fry's passion for the cinema, but it is also the subject of artistic differences, with its producers said to fear that it may be too explicit for mainstream audiences.

Benjamin Northover, a Harry Potter actor who stars opposite Fry, told Mandrake: "There's a struggle going on at the moment. I hope it will be resolved and be out in November, as planned, because it is such a heartfelt and important film."

The makers, Delux Productions, are alleged to want to tone down the film's graphic portrayal of the death of Northover's character from Aids after working as a prostitute at the House of Boys, a club for homosexuals in Eighties Amsterdam. Director Jean Claude Schlim is believed to be resisting the changes.

"What a shame that in 2010 it is still considered too graphic to portray this kind of story in what is a very honest and important film," said Northover, who attended the premiere of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky at the Soho Hotel. "People should not be frightened of the truth."

[Continued here]

• House of Boys (2009) [IMDb]

Julieta: "That's the way it is in life. Everything has two sides."



From Beginning To End (Do Começo ao Fim) (2011) Review [P. H. Davies, April 3, 2011]

Aluizio Abranches' controversial film, From Beginning to End (2011), caused quite the scandal when it premiered at the Festival do Rio in 2009 and has remained unseen outside of Brazil since its debut. However, after much wrangling, it is finally being released on DVD in the UK on 28 March by TLA Releasing and will no doubt continue its notoriety amongst British gay audiences. The film concerns two half-brothers, Francisco and Thomás, living in the Brazilian hinterlands with their mother and stepfather. The brothers are extremely close as children, but after their mother's death their stepfather leaves them the family home. The adult brothers become lovers and create a sort of safe haven isolating them from the rest of the world. The director's intention in the film was to explore a kind of love which society could never understand and which still manages to survive despite these conditions.

[Continued here]

• Official website
• Jay Weissberg: From Beginning to End [Variety]

Sascha Kekez: "It's Sasha's first time and he's so infatuated with this guy, so it
should be nice and decent and not some soft-core porn scene. And I
must admit, I was relieved I didn't have to strip naked too."



Sasha: Student crush gets gay twist (2010) [Sydney Star Observer, July 12, 2011]

Last year's German coming-of-age drama Sasha, released in Australia on DVD this month, is another in a long line of teen 'coming out' films to join the annals of gay cinema.

That it feels so fresh despite telling such a well-worn tale is in no small part thanks to an assured performance from its lead, 28-year-old actor Sascha Kekez.

Kekez plays the film's title role of Sasha Petrovic, a prodigiously talented music student who is forced to come out to his family when his strong attraction to his openly gay piano teacher Gebhard (played with an alluring cockiness by Tim Bergmann) can no longer be contained.

Speaking to the Star Observer from his home in Munich, Kekez said he held great affection for this, his first film.

"The movie came in my life at a very hard time. I'd just finished drama school, and I'd had to fight my way through it for four years because the teachers didn't like me. There were a couple of deaths in my family too," he explained.

[Continued here]

• Sasha (Sasa) | Review [smellslikescreenspirit.com, September 14, 2010]

Ricky Mastro: "It took me one year to find the couple because, as a gay filmmaker, I had always had this stereotype that, different than gay men, lesbians had long term relationships."



Fucking Different São Paulo (2010) [eurOut, May 3, 2011]

Fucking Different São Paulo (2009) is the fourth edition of the conceptual series Fucking Different from German producer Kristian Petersen.

The first three Fucking Different films were shot in Berlin, New York and Tel Aviv. This fourth part is an anthology of shorts aiming to provide a crossover of diverse views of queer sexuality in contemporary São Paulo from the perspective of twelve gay and lesBian filmmakers.

[Continued here]

• Fucking Different São Paulo [IMDb]

Beginners: Coming out is only the beginning (2010) [Sydney Star Observer, August 17, 2011]

In writer/director Mike Mills latest film, Beginners, 30-something graphic designer Oliver (Ewan McGregor), reeling from the death of his mother, is forced to deal with a second familial bombshell. His 75-year-old father Hal (Christopher Plummer), freshly widowed, announces he wants to spend the rest of his life living as he's always wanted - as an openly gay man.

Hal then spends five full, tumultuous years as a man reborn before succumbing to cancer and passing away. It's a remarkable story - and it's all true. Oliver is based on Mills himself, Hal his father.

"After my dad came out, we started having much more intense and honest conversations about relationships about life. Heated discussions about what's possible in love: me from my perspective as a man born in '66, he as an older man who's lived both a straight and a gay life. For me, the film is really that conversation turned into a story," Mills told the Star Observer during a recent Sydney visit ahead of the film's August 25 Australian release.

[Continued here]

• Beginners (2010) [IMDb]
• Oscars 2012: Christopher Plummer on his 'explosion' of great roles [Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2012]

Christopher Plummer made films for close to five decades without getting an Oscar nomination, but on Tuesday he picked up his second in three years with his work in "Beginners," in which he plays a retiree who comes out of the closet after his wife's death.

"Awards and nominations don't cross your mind. They're not something you think about when you do the work. You just think about simply doing something that's good," Plummer said with a chuckle. "That's your focus and your goal -- just to do the thing that's right in front of you." ...

"There's no pity in it," Plummer said of the movie written and directed by Mike Mills. "It's tough, and it's honest. I adored the role the first time I read the script, and it changed very little. What was there at the beginning [in the script] was there in the film. There's a sweetness and a hopeful feeling about death and this feeling that it's never too late for your life to be fulfilling and to be contributing to society."

• Oscar crowns The Artist as best picture [CBC, February 27, 2012]

Canadian icon Christopher Plummer became the oldest performer to win an acting Oscar, scoring his first-ever Academy Award for his turn in Beginners. Playing a widower who comes out and embraces his homosexuality, Plummer, 82, won best supporting actor and received a standing ovation from the Hollywood crowd.

"You're only two years older than me darling, where have you been all my life?" he told his Oscar statuette.

"When I emerged from my mother's womb, I was already rehearsing my Academy thank-you speech. But it was so long ago, mercifully for you I've forgotten it. But I haven't forgotten who to thank," he quipped before acknowledging his fellow nominees, Beginners director Mike Mills, co-star Ewan McGregor and his family.

Capturing 'Wise Kids' (2011) [Post and Courier, July 18, 2010]

Utter the phrase "coming-of-age story" and the image too often conjured is that of a genre bereft of fresh ideas, a slave to the tried-and-true.

With notable exceptions, we get hopelessly cliched tales whose characters and plot, however "charming," are more than a little threadbare.

Stephen Cone was determined that his second feature, "The Wise Kids," would be cut from a different cloth.

"I wasn't interested in doing a movie about slackers," says the Chicago-based writer-director who is a son of Frank and Judy Cone of Charleston. "A lot of teenagers are brooding and passive and apathetic. I'm interested in teenagers who are actually engaged with the world and with themselves and are interested in opening themselves up to life, growing and becoming better."

With an ensemble of Chicago and Charleston actors on board, and a crew from as far away as Los Angeles, "The Wise Kids" opens principal photography here Monday.

[Continued here]

• The Wise Kids (2011) [IMDb]

Michael's father Enrique: "What does this say about me?"



"Gun Hill Road", Not Your Typical Bronx Tale (2011) [Bronx News Network, June 3, 2011]

One of the great pleasures of watching "Gun Hill Road," a new independent film by Bronx native Rashaad Ernesto Green that debuted in front of a New York audience during the first-ever Bronx Week Film Festival in mid-May, is its familiarity.

Look, there's New Capitol diner on Kingsbridge Road and Jerome! Is he getting on the 2 train or the 4 train? Wait, isn't that the bodega on Gun Hill Road in Norwood?

"The Bronx itself is a character," Green said during a question-and-answer session after the screening.

While the setting, characters and dialogue all feel like the Bronx, the storyline deals with difficult topics - most notably, transgender lifestyle choices and how they play out in Latino families - that are only now starting to be discussed openly in the borough.

[Continued here]

• Gun Hill Road (2011) [IMDb]
• Michael Musto: Transgender Experience Comes To The Cineplex [Village Voice, July 29, 2011]

After the screening at Newfest last night, Green said he discovered the affecting Santana when he saw her working an AIDS prevention booth at the Queens Pride Parade.

Said the writer/director:

"She was at the beginning of her transition and it wasn't visible. ... On the set, she developed confidence and started to come dressed like a woman. The transition you see in the movie was happening in her own life at the same time."

• When They Play Women, It's Not Just an Act [New York Times, July 28, 2011]

Dukakis, Fricker set for "Cloudburst" (2011) [Variety, June 30, 2009]

Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker will star in road-trip comedy "Cloudburst" for Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, with Thom Fitzgerald directing from his own script.

SKE is financing "Cloudburst"; Fitzgerald is producing with Doug Pettigrew while William Jarblum exec produces. Production starts this month in Nova Scotia.

Story centers on two women who have lived as lovers for 30 years and decide to break out of the nursing facility where one of them has been committed.

Dukakis most recently starred in "Away From Her" with Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent. Fricker recently co-starred in Richard Attenborough's "Closing the Ring" with Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer.

Fitzgerald most recently produced and directed "The Gospel According to the Blues" for Canadian television.

[Continued here]

• Cloudburst (2011) [IMDb]

• A queer Thelma and Louise story: Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker hit the road in a world premiere at the Atlantic Film Festival [XTRA, September 13, 2011]

"I'd like to say it was inspired by a romantic inspiration. I've had a partner for over a decade [the film's director, Doug Pettigrew] and am old enough to have spent most of my life thinking marriage to him was not a possibility," Fitzgerald says. "It was confusing to me to be middle-aged and suddenly have to contemplate the idea of being allowed to marry. And that made me wonder what it is like for people in same-sex relationships who are 60, 70, 80 years old. For the landscape of possibility to change so radically near the end of your life."

"Weekend" is a Gay Relationship Drama Worth Waiting For (2011)
[After Elton, March 15, 2011 ]

At some point in almost every fine artist's career, he or she will paint a bowl of fruit. Most of those paintings will be mediocre at best, but some will be extraordinary. Why? It all comes down to execution, of course.

A story where two strangers meet and develop a love affair over the course of a single weekend? This is the "bowl of fruit" of movie plots. It's been done so many times that there's nothing particularly novel or gimmicky about the story itself that will draw viewers to the movie: whether the film-going experience is satisfying will ultimately depend entirely on execution.

Fortunately, in the case of the new UK movie Weekend, having its debut this week at the South by Southwest Film Festival, the execution is terrific.

Shy, self-conscious Russell has a modest, unassuming life in Nottingham, England; his mostly straight friends don't ask about his life as a gay man, and he doesn't tell. One Friday night, after spending time with them, he visits a gay bar where he meets a brash, outspoken artist named Glen. What starts out as a drunken and drug-fueled one-night stand, soon becomes something more as they're clearly drawn to each other over the course of that single weekend, even as they resent the assumptions that each makes about the other's life choices.

Soon we learn something that makes both characters think they can't possibly have much of a future together. "I don't do boyfriends," Glen says, and he later adds, "I don't do goodbyes."

[Continued here]

• Watch an Exclusive Clip From Weekend, the Most Acclaimed Gay Movie of the Year [New York magazine, September 14, 2011]
• 'Weekend' Explores How Homophobia Discourages Gay Monogamy And Authenticity [AlterNet, November 2, 2011]

What Does a Gay Horse Eat? A 'Haaaay': Reading of Steven Spielberg's 'War Horse' (2011)
[Indiewire, December 23, 2011]

First and foremost, War Horse himself - or "Joey," as lead character Albert names him - is totally gay. You can simply read this in the textbook way that he's "different" from the other horses (mainly because no one thinks he could "plow a field," ha) but it also gets a lot more literal.

When Joey gets sent off to war, the British soldiers segregate him next to a big, black beautiful horse - named, I kid you not Topthorn - who the soldiers also deem "different" and "unruly." It's only a matter of time before Joey and Topthorn are getting intimate, kissing each other, snuggling, and clearly growing to find an affectionate and mutual dependence on one another. They go through quite a lot: Being captured by the Germans (more on that later), spending some time with a[n] over-the-top French girl (and on that as well), and they always have to fight not to be separated.

In the most dramatic display of Joey's love for his mate (who given his fur is often simply referred to in an oddly racialized way as the "black horse"), he stops the Germans from making Topthorn the lead on a working line that he likely won't be able to handle because of his poor health condition. Joey does so by making it clear he's the right horse for the job instead, thus saving Topthorn's life but threatening his own.

[Continued here]

Gay-Themed Movie [The Parade] Overcomes Balkan Divide (2011)
[Edge Boston, March 22, 2012]

Gays and soldiers usually don't mix in the conservative Balkans. Neither do former foes from the region's ethnic wars. Yet a tale about a Serbian wartime fighter who recruits enemy veterans to protect a gay pride event has become an unlikely movie sensation.

"The Parade," a black comedy made by a Serbian director, has been the biggest box office hit in the former Yugoslavia in years, even as it challenges both the region's ethnic divide and its deeply rooted homophobia.

The movie has drawn more than half a million people since its release in October. It has been equally acclaimed in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia - something no local film has managed since the 1990s wars between the ex-Yugoslav republics.

"The whole region is united for the first time in liking this film," director Srdjan Dragojevic said in an interview.

[Continued here]

• The Parade (2011) [IMDb]
• Gay Movie THE PARADE: Blockbuster 'Unites' Yugoslavia [Alt Film Guide, March 22, 2012]

Sherlock Homo: A Game of Eyeshadows (2011)
[After Elton, January 2, 2012 ]

Remember 2009, when Guy Ritchie's first foray into that bachelor's flat at 221 Baker Street raised eyebrows over how Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) acted like a bickering gay couple? There were all sorts of stories of Downey claiming it was an intentional character interpretation and how the executor of Conan Doyle's estate was unhappy about it, etc.

But that homoerotic aspect of the film was pretty canny, and a big part of its advance marketing. It no doubt drew a lot of people into theaters who might otherwise have skipped out on a Guy Ritchie film. And count me in that camp. I mean, give me queer subtext over Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - or Snatch - any day!

But for all the homo hoohaw, that Holmes and Watson bromance in the first film was fairly tame.

Roll forward to the 2011 sequel. Ritchie says he wanted to give audiences "even more" of what they liked in the first film, and so they put the queer flourishes on at full blast. Holmes in full drag. Check. Watson pointing various phallic objects at Holmes. Check. Holmes lying shirtless next to Watson, asking him to pull the trigger and, "make it count!" Oh for goodness sake. Just do it already.

[Continued here]

• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows [Sydney Morning Herald, December 31, 2011]

''LIE down with me, Watson,'' murmurs Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey jnr) to his chum (Jude Law) as gunmen blast away at the locked door of their train compartment in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Adding to the ambiguity of the situation, our hero is in full, if unconvincing, drag and has recently tossed Watson's new bride (Kelly Reilly) out of the moving train into a river. Naturally, Holmes is acting from entirely honorable motives. Which doesn't alter the fact that by this point - in the immortal words of Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer - ''the subtext is rapidly becoming the text''.

Affecting a high-pitched giggle and habitually addressed by his brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) as ''Shirley'', this Holmes is perhaps the most flamboyant action hero in Hollywood history, discounting the George Hamilton spoof Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981).

Erica Abeel: Yossi Looks at a Closeted Gay Man in Israeli Society (2012)
[HuffPo, April 21, 2012]

In a sequel of sorts to his 2003 Yossi and Jagger, Fox follows a dead man walking who returns, spiritually and physically, to the living. Living gay in Israel is Fox's prime subject; he filters this tale of rebirth through the emotional journey of a closeted doctor working in Tel Aviv. In Fox's films, especially when touching on the army, Israel comes across as a tough, aggressive, uber masculine culture. What makes Fox so compelling is his ability is to probe the problematic position of gay people in Israeli society, while also mining the subject for delicious comic treatment.

As Yossi, Ohad Knoller returns to the role that won him TFF's Best Actor award in Fox's 2003 tale of two soldiers in love. The film starts slow, proceeding, 'til the exuberant second act, with a deliberate tension-generating pace. Now, like most caffeinated New Yorkers, slow makes me nervous, but there are different kinds of slow: the one that sets you thinking about what to defrost for dinner; and another -- like in Fox's film -- that massages and grips you tight as it builds to dramatic completion.

Perennially sad and a workaholic, Yossi lives and sleeps at the hospital. Not even his close associate (Lior Ashkenazi in a cameo) suspects he's gay, and in one abrasive scene he drags him along, on a rare night out, to a raunchy session with two women in a bar. His nurse, also unaware, hits on him during his regular morning wake-up in the office. During his scant private time Yossi strikes out with an online date, a narcissistic club owner who's amazed the unworldly Yossi has never heard of his club. Like a novelist, Fox consistently uses such telling details to nail -- and in this case deflate -- a character. The date then accuses Yossi of posting an old, more youthful photo and says, "How about going down on me and we'll call it a night?"

[Continued here]

• Yossi and Jagger (2002) [IMDb]
• Gay Israeli Drama 'Yossi,' Sequel to 'Yossi and Jagger,' Is Possibly Eytan Fox's Finest Work [Indie Wire, April 20, 2012]

At the end of "Yossi and Jagger," the energetic Lior Amichai "Jagger" (Yehuda Levi) tragically died on the battlefield before he and Yossi managed to resolve their differences. Having carried on a clandestine affair for two years, the couple had yet to come out to their families, and while Jagger insisted they do so upon returning from military duty, the paranoid Yossi (Ohad Knoller) preferred to stay in the closet.

As its title implies, "Yossi" catches up with the character 10 years later and finds him still a solitary figure, haunted by Jagger's death and more closeted than ever. The script, by Itay Segal, subtly hints that even if society has changed, Yossi's headspace remains the same. Viewers unfamiliar with the first movie won't need the backstory to figure out why he's so unhappy.

Lesbian Helmed Thriller 'The House' Debuts Tonight (2012)
[She Wired, April 30, 2012]

When queer female filmmaker Desiree Lim makes her international premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival tonight, it may be a surprise for ardent fans of her work. After all, the acclaimed director of the award-winning Floored by Love and Sugar Sweet (the first lesbian commercial feature made by a queer filmmaker in Japan) took a departure with her newest film. The House, starring Natalie Skye, is a psychological ghost story, a sort of atmospheric and moody think piece about life and death and the choices we all make or don't make (and, like all her works, there's a queer bent).

The film has already garnered Lim the best screenwriting award and best performance award for Skye at the 2012 Vancouver Women in Film Festival. We caught up with Lim to chat about her film, which premiers tonight, 8:30 p.m. in Newport Beach, Calif.

SW: Why set a story around dead characters that continue to punish each other in the afterlife?

DL: As a filmmaker, I have always been fascinated by the mystery of afterlife. This is my attempt to engage in a dialogue between the living and the dead about love, loss, dreams, and regrets, in the context of our current human condition.

SW: This is a change for you.

DL: Yes, this film marks my first venture into the darker realms of the human experience, and the theme of mortality. For this script, I revisited an old concept that I had years ago for an intimate drama where the lead character is still alive and is trapped in a house with other characters that are deceased. I wanted to explore the theme of a group of souls who are trapped in limbo and not able to move forward in their lives. For Jean, who's still alive but has lived like the walking dead and for the ghosts, who have passed on but unable to move on in their afterlife - both the living and the dead are spiritually and physically stuck in a point in time. The House is not a conventional ghost story but a psychological study on the lives of characters that come from different social and cultural backgrounds, each having varying worldviews and separated by self-imposed isolation.

[Continued here]

Gregor Schmidinger: Director's Interpretation for [Project] Homophobia (2011)
[Irrational Realm, September 27, 2011]

I believe that there is no one truth. Both science and art claim to strive for truth. But both disciplines define truth differently. Science is going after an objective truth while art is trying to uncover a subjective one. Both perspectives are valid since there seems to be an objective world but we can only experience it subjectively influenced by memories, beliefs and the biological limitations of our bodies.

In Homophobia, I want to express both truths in order to communicate that everyone experiences life differently. For me, it can be the best day of my life, while someone else has his worst. Sometimes we forget that we all perceive life differently. Someone might just be bored but someone else might think about killing himself. My intention is to create an awareness for this fact so that we all become more sensitive to other's perspectives.

This multi-perspective concept will be applied to all aspects of filmmaking such as camera work, sound and art design.

[Continued here]

The First Digital Revolution: Lesbian-Directed 'Hysteria' Hits Theaters (2011)
[The Advocate, May 18, 2012]

When lesbian filmmaker Tanya Wexler heard about the treatment for female hysteria (i.e. orgasms) she says, "It made me laugh. I knew it was a story I had to tell." Her new film, Hysteria, which premiers today, is a romantic comedy wrapped around the amusing story of the first electro-mechanical vibrator, invented in 1880 by happenstance, at a time when Victorian prudishness coincided with the dawn of the electrical age.

Despite the fact that there are no out LGBT people in the film, the sentiment of this charming, quirky film - perhaps thanks to both the lead characters and director Tanya Wexler's acknowledged lesbian lens - makes it feel like it belongs in squarely the lesbian cinema cannon.

Hugh Dancy is Dr. Mortimer Granville, a well-meaning doctor who is too earnest and caring to stay employed for long in the rather staid world of medicine. In an early scene, he's arguing with a senior physician over whether a woman needs her blackened and filthy bandages replaced (he's arguing for it) and has to explain that "germs" could get in and infect her leg, leading to gangrene or death. The stodgy doc doesn't believe in this newfangled thing called "germs" (which has thus far only been reported in obscure medical journals) and fires Dr. Granville on the spot. We get it, he's a different sort of man, and a different sort of doctor.

[Continued here]

• Hysteria (2011) [IMDb]
• Hysteria: movie review [CSM, May 18, 2012 ]

Dancy's Dr. Mortimer Granville has forward-looking ideas about medicine - no leeches, no bleeding of his patients - that consistenly get him into trouble. Needing a job, he winds up as the assistant to Dr. Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce, at his most archly comic), who specializes in treating female "hysteria" by manually releasing their "nervous tension." He also has two daughters, the prim and marriageable Emily (Felicity Jones) and the abrasive suffragette Charlotte (Gyllenahaal). Guess who Mortimer falls for?