Almost Famous
Guy Trebay captures the essential things about the sexual playground that was Manhattan during the transition from Doom to Glitter.
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Queer Ghosts on Oscar Night
That LGBT people in film are disproportionately represented as killers or as killed (or both) is not breaking news. … Here my focus—and grievance—is with Oscar-winning films and roles after 1985 in which LGBT people perish or come to a bad end.
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John Waters Went There
The Hollywood star, the museum exhibit, and the book are huge honors for John Waters. It’s been a long, strange trip to mainstream acceptance for Waters, an auteur who specializes in what he calls “art-exploitation” films and who was dubbed the “Pope of Trash” by William S. Burroughs in 1986.
MoreThe Making of Longtime Companion
IN THE LATE 1980s, getting a motion picture made about LGBT people that didn’t cast them as villains, psychos, or freaks was a momentous challenge. A mainstream feature film…More
Spoiler Alert (Not Really)
The loneliness in All of Us Strangers is established at the start. The high-rise in which Adam lives seems to have no other residents but him.
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On the Road to Hobohemia
Jack Worby was one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who took to the roads and rails of America in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. They called themselves tramps or hoboes or ’boes.
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The Silence of The Bell Jar
SET IN 1953 and published ten years later, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a female coming-of-age story like J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher…More
Figures of the Bay Area
Wonner and Brown frequented the Yuba River, indulging in naked swims. Wonner’s paintings of nude bathers went unquestioned because they aligned with the established tradition of men bathing together. Drawing inspiration from Paul Cézanne, Wonner portrays the bathers as a dynamic mass of interwoven, predominantly male figures. Wonner sent a touching Christmas card to Brown in which he referred to himself as “Paul Cézanne,” an acknowledgment of the influence of the French artist on their work. In contrast to Wonner’s approach, Brown’s bathers, such as Standing Bathers (1993), which is the official image of the exhibition, …
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Butterflies Caught in a Web
Yone Noguchi, this handsome Japanese poet from California, might possibly be the New Kid, someone who was young, racially
exotic, and very talented.
One Hundred Years of Togetherness
WHILE the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York’s Greenwich Village is generally considered the spark that ignited the gay liberation movement in the U.S., San Francisco was the true epicenter of gay life for much of the previous century, as demonstrated by the following chronology of quick takes that briefly highlight some of the pioneering individuals, organizations, publications, and events that took place in San Francisco.
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