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.
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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.
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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.
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Reviews of Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, My Mother Says, Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, Swollening: Poems, Friedrich Nietzsche (Critical Lives), and the album Homosexual by Darren Hayes.
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Our Flag Means Death is unlike any other show out there, although I must warn viewers beforehand not to expect a clichéd fairy-tale ending. And yet, if Season 1 comes to an end, can Season 2 be far behind?
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The exhibition Coyote Park: I Love You Like Mirrors Do, curated by Stamatina Gregory, is the inaugural project for an initiative called “Interventions,” which “engages queer artists and cultural producers to dive into the museum’s extensive collection and creatively present their research, building new narratives and interpretations from diverse subjectivities.”
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We tend to assume that positive gay-themed imagery is a phenomenon of the post-Stonewall world. But to look at these illustrations by Leyendecker and his contemporaries is to see overt depictions of sensual male beauty.
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The opera The Hours brings to the stage the LGBT love lives (including their failures) of Laura Brown, Kitty, Clarissa and Sally, and Richard and Louis. Indeed it adds one same-sex relationship to the mix. A key incident in both Mrs Dalloway and in the 1990s Clarissa story involves Clarissa buying flowers for the party. In the opera, the florist, Barbara (sung beautifully by Kathleen Kim), has an extended coloratura flirtation with Clarissa as well.
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CHICAGO’S WRIGHTWOOD 659, a private institution focused on socially engaged art, mounted a landmark exhibition, The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930, last fall. A team of international scholars, led by art historian Jonathan D. Katz, assembled a groundbreaking show with over 100 paintings, prints, photographs, and film clips that reveal how, as Katz notes, “while language narrowed into a simplistic binary of homosexual / heterosexual, art gave form to a nuanced range of sexualities and genders that can best be described as queer.”
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My Policeman and Spoiler Alert could not be more dissimilar in tone, but they both portray men in love as dismally doomed from the get-go. Neither challenges the cultural script that male relationships must end disastrously, though My Policeman does offer the two principles some redemption as old men.
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