We Want the Funk
Beyond “Goat Head,” Jaime is Howard’s most forceful expression of her politics, and it could have only been recorded at this point in American history.
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Gender Fluidity Comes to Reality TV
MTV recently decided to morph its Are You the One? franchise into a “sexually fluid” experiment. In the new season of the show, called “Come One Come All,” sixteen people live in a mansion together in an attempt to discover who is their “perfect match.” At the end of the season, if all eight perfect-match couples are together, they share a prize of one million dollars. In this new season, each of the sixteen people identifies as bisexual, pansexual, or simply as fluid, resulting in each person having fifteen possible perfect matches rather than seven as in previous seasons, based as they were upon a cisgender–heterosexual model, where women only matched with men.
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A 19th-century ‘Oddity’ Who Kept a Diary
ANYONE who watches a regular diet of HBO knows that the show Gentleman Jack refers to a real-life English lesbian and landowner of the early 1800s, who is now the charismatic central character in this new series. Anne Lister, born into the scientifically-minded family that produced Joseph Lister and eventually lent its name to Listerine mouthwash, was also one of the great English diarists.
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Stonewall Comes to the 100′ Screen
Rise Up is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, but one thing you take away from it is that New York was hardly the origin of the gay rights movement. It really began in Los Angeles and then spread to Washington, D.C.
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While They’re in the World
Like Sir Elton, the Material Girl is a showgirl at heart, and no less familiar with rapid outfit changes. Her latest look involves an eye patch, a black veil, and a Sergeant Pepper jacket. On Madame X, she declares “I will be gay” if gay people are “burned” before identifying with other victims of discrimination: Muslims, Africans, women, and the poor.
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Film Briefs
Short reviews of State of Pride, Vita and Virginia, Making Montgomery Clift, Adam, An Almost Ordinary Summer, and End of the Century.
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Short Reviews
Upon arriving in Italy from their enchanted island, Prospero forcibly separates Miranda from Ferdinand and takes her to their family palace in gloomy Milan. Miranda is locked in her chambers like a prisoner with few visitors except for a grim governess and Dorothea. Luckily, …
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HBO’s Takedown of Michael Jackson
This documentary (Leaving Neverland) is tragic, riveting, and flawed. New challenges to its accounts have come out more recently, as construction documents reveal that a structure on Jackson’s property where [James] Safechuck claims to have been abused in 1992 was only built in 1994.
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A Singer-Songwriter to Watch Out For
If the vocals on Sing to Me Instead don’t give you the chills, you should see a doctor. On a twelve-track album that details numerous relationships, old and new, the strongest of the songs are “Ease My Mind” and “Grow As We Go.” The former, which dabbles in gospel music, allows [Ben] Platt to channel his inner Whitney Houston …
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The Greek Inspiration for Modern Dance
A vast number of the innovators who helped to bridge the classical world and the modern world were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual, starting with Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Ida Rubenstein.
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