Soon after The Normal Heart opened at the Golden Theater in late April, and just before he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor, I discussed the challenges of his role, and of being an out actor in homophobic Hollywood.
MoreAfter all those years of experience and personal filmmaking, the thirty-year-old Caouette put his tragic story out there with Tarnation, and the rest is his story. Now a father living in New York City with his boyfriend, Caouette sat down with me during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
MoreAll the King’s Men are Katie Allen, Julee Antonellis, Leighsa Burgin, Jill Gibson, Maria Kogan, and Karin Webb. I interviewed them in person late last year.
MoreA TRANSGENDER musician, animator, and filmmaker working in Seattle, Clyde Petersen has released ten albums with the band Your Heart Breaks. He regularly tours with Kimya Dawson, whose childlike voice sweetens the movie Juno’s soundtrack. Despite Petersen’s gentle guitar riffs and soft-spoken lyrics, his musical influences include jarring artists from the feminist punk movement known as Riot Grrrl, which emerged out of Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990’s. He has animated and directed videos for bands like Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down and the Shaky Hands. In 2010, Petersen released a documentary film, The Unspeakable, which explores the work of fifteen Northwest artists.
MoreBY NIGHTFALL, Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, begins with a quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies concerning the terrifying, unfathomable power of beauty—its ability to rattle our foundations and take us unawares. True to form, Cunningham explores here a region that’s outside the sexual mainstream, whether gay or straight, in this case the story of a straight man who’s an art dealer in a stable but staid marriage, whose world is rocked by the arrival of his wife’s much younger brother, the gorgeous, charming, and deceitful “Mizzy” (for “Mistake,” as his birth was unplanned).
MoreREGULAR visitors to Provincetown may know Larry Collins as the cordial and knowledgeable man behind the counter at Larry Collins Fine Art, the gallery that he’s directed at the West End of Commercial Street since 2004. Browsing through his collection of photographs, paintings, artifacts, and memorabilia—including works by such renowned artists as James Bidgood, Mike Disfarmer, Damien Hirst, and Wilhelm von Glöeden—it quickly becomes clear that Collins’ curatorial scrutiny is sharp, studied, and eclectic.
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A LONGTIME resident of Manhattan with a number of solo exhibitions and group shows from New York City to Provincetown, Gerald Mocarsky is a gay photographer whose work embodies a unique sense of queer urban living. Standing apart from a gay photographic world dominated by nude male Adonises, Mocarsky’s work urges the viewer not to salivate but to observe and think about what it means to be gay in the new millennium. Mocarsky works in series, not unlike Cindy Sherman and Jack Pierson: the images are individualistic, but connected by a universal arc of meaning. His two most recent series relate to dance and cosmetics.
MoreTHOUGHTFUL, deadpan, prolific, and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of music, Stephin Merritt can be a tough nut to crack when he’s interviewed, whether by me or by filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, who spent a decade shooting the documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, which takes a long look at the creative processes behind one of America’s most versatile songwriters.
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For the last six years, Sheng has photographed high school and college athletes who are out of the closet, an ongoing project he has titled “Fearless.” The most widely seen exhibition of “Fearless” was at the corporate headquarters of ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut. That show was covered in a feature on ABC World News. “Fearless” is usually displayed in school gyms, where athletes pass by it in droves.
MoreThis interview was conducted in Jonathan Ned Katz’s art studio in New York City.
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