The Indispensable Man
Rustin does an excellent job of confronting directly the homophobia that Rustin faced from other African-American leaders while also capturing his charisma as a political organizer and strategist.
MoreBrowsing: Film
Blog Posts
Short Reviews
Reviews of Queer Heroes of Myth and Legend: A Celebration of Gay Gods, Sapphic Saints, and Queerness Through the Ages, Spring in Siberia, A Novel, Movies that Made Me Gay, Who Does that Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag, and The Queer Film Guide.
More
The Wages of Narcissism
LIKE PASSAGES, Ira Sachs’ latest film, his 2014 film Love Is Strange had a gay couple at its center. But while the earlier film featured a longtime pair of sympathetic aging men (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) living apart under forced economic circumstances, Passages focuses on two thirty-something married artists who prosper on the cultural cutting edge, with an apartment in Paris and a modest retreat in the country. One of them, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a film director originally from Germany, experiments sexually with a woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and, finding satisfaction in the adventure, matter-of-factly informs his British husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) of this episode.
More
Loving Fassbinder
While he had made a couple of earlier short films, Fassbinder didn’t get to direct his first feature film until 1969. The film was Love Is Colder Than Death, a gangster movie that imitates similar films from Hollywood from the 1930s up to the 1950s, starring himself as a criminal torn between his love for two women and his friendship with another man.
More
Short Reviews
Short reviews of the books RAVING: Practices by McKenzie Wark, QUEER PRINT IN EUROPE edited by Glyn Davis and Laura Guy, AMERICAN CLASSICIST: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman, and WHEN LANGUAGE BROKE OPEN: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent Edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez; and the film FRAMING AGNES directed by Chase Joynt.
More
Midnight Love Affair
In his reconsideration of Midnight Cowboy, Jon Towlson suggests that, when seen from all of these perspectives, the film represents an important turning point in the presentation of gay themes—not quite a celebration of gay male bonding but a crucial step in this direction and thus a forerunner to many films that followed.
More
A Rock Built on Sand
Kijak’s documentary, Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed, wants to show how Hudson was the ultimate victim of the “celluloid closet,” as film historian Vito Russo called it back in 1981. This was the same year in which Hudson underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery due to his pack-a-day smoking and alcohol intake.
More
A Star Turn for The Golden Boy
OFFICIALLY CHRISTENED Eternal Youth but generally known to natives of Winnipeg by its nickname “The Golden Boy,” the statue high above the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building seems to have been inspired by Giambologna’s Flying Mercury in Florence’s Bargello.
More
Nan Goldin’s Song of Herself
Goldin is one of the documentary’s producers and its principal protagonist. The film thematically weaves together two complex narrative strands: her personal story and the protest against the Sacklers. The latter takes place against the backdrop of images from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), her autobiographical slide show set to music that became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s and elevated Goldin to prominence as a photographer.
More
The Way Things Were
YIDDISH has entered the American language so extensively by now that most people have probably heard the word “shiksa”—especially if they’ve read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s the Yiddish word for a gentile woman. Robert Hofler’s new book on the making of the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford movie The Way We Were (1973) is about its masculine equivalent, the much less euphonic “shegetz.”
More