We Were There
THE EXHILARATION of visiting Queer Lens: A History of Photography at Los Angeles’ Getty Center begins at the museum’s front steps, which have been painted in rainbow stripes with the words “Celebrate Love” sweeping across them.
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Looking for Love in Mostly Wrong Places
Review of the films Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, Sauna, Dreams (Sex Love), Jimpa, and Cactus Pears.
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Windows on Worlds Far from Home
Reviews of the movies: Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, The Wedding Banquet, The Rebrand, I’m Your Venus, and Heightened Scrutiny
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Love across Cultures, with a Twist
A NICE INDIAN BOY is an exuberant film as well as a touching celebration of unconventional romantic love defying expectations. Director Roshan Sethi’s film also touches upon issues of family loyalty, cultural misunderstanding, and intergenerational conflict.
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Under the Covers
Without spoiling both series, Black Doves ends with a sacrificial act, on Sam’s part, to ensure Helen’s safety, while Prime Target will shock you inasmuch as Adam’s closeness to Ed may or may not be a Judas kiss.
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The Sex Was Out of This World
LOS ANGELES has always been a destination for eccentrics seeking personal transformation. In what other city could a pioneering rocket scientist lead occult rituals, a satanic Hollywood studio secretary publish one of the first lesbian zines, or a communist musicologist forever transform queer identity? A fascinating exhibition, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation, celebrates these artifacts of L.A.’s weirdness.
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Addicted to Love (and Heroin)
This movie feels like a journey, even an adventure, not only to a different time and place—into the Amazon, along for a psychedelic trip—but further inward. If each person contains an entire universe, Guadagnino, like [William S.] Burroughs, endeavors to chart a course for the stars, despite the deep holes that await him along the way.
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Writers Were Meant to Be Seen
James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance celebrates the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth in 1924. The exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington is a small but radical combination of faces and events that focus on Baldwin’s Civil Rights activities during the 1960s along with the activists he knew and shared his politics with, including Martin Luther King, Jr., gay activist Bayard Rustin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (who was largely closeted), singer Nina Simone, poet Langston Hughes, and many others.
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Keith Haring’s Midwestern Moment
Haring’s populism, his desire to bring art to the masses, serves as the most prominent theme in both shows. This is captured most succinctly in the title of the show Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody (which traveled from Los Angeles and Toronto to arrive in Minneapolis, and features an expansive catalogue).
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Growing Up in Chaotic Times
DIRECTOR ANDREA ARNOLD’s new film, Bird, which she both wrote and directed, premiered at NewFest, New York City’s annual LGBTQ+ film festival. It’s an unsparing yet sympathetic look into the hardscrabble life of the tough but vulnerable twelve-year-old Bailey, played by newcomer Nykiya Adams, an interracial girl who more-or-less presents as a boy, and her rambunctious father, “Bug,” played with screen-stealing gusto by the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, who recently rocketed to fame in Saltburn.
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