BTW
Takes on news of the day.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2011
July-August 2011
Blog Posts
Eating Disorders: The Gay Connection
Understanding eating disorders within the gay community requires examination on multiple fronts. Personal stories need to be told. Research needs to be put into perspective. The facts need to be absorbed into the larger context of gay identity.
MoreElizabeth Taylor: Movie Star, Angel of Mercy
… Every would-be icon who has followed-from Madonna to Angelina Jolie or Paris Hilton-has sought to emulate her. But without Taylor’s unique blend of spontaneity and strategy, authenticity and audacity, none have risen to her heights. Nor is it likely, in this very different world, that anyone ever will.
MoreOn Writing a Poetry of Expansiveness
This interview is an edited collation of e-mail exchanges and a one-hour telephone conversation that occurred late last year.
MoreJoe Gage Put the Art into ‘Art Film’
WHEN I FIRST STUMBLED across Joe Gage’s film L.A. Tool & Die (1979), which was billed as a gay porn movie, I was astonished. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “this is a real film!” As the mix of cinematography, image, soundtrack, vignettes, and intermittent but increasingly compelling narrative unfolded, the sexual content became powerful to the point of being unsettling. That’s when I realized that L.A. Tool & Die—and Gage’s other early works, Kansas City Trucking Co., and El Paso Wrecking Corp.—were more than “real films.” They were art, of a kind I’d never encountered before.
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An Artist Hors Catégorie
BEFORE HIS DESIGNS for the Broadway production of Dracula and his animated titles for the television series Mystery! made him internationally famous, Edward Gorey was known mainly for a series of quirky little books of which he was not only the illustrator but the author and sometimes the publisher as well.
MorePaul Monette’s Borrowed Time Revisited
[Author’s Note: About a decade ago, I started work on a book about Paul Monette. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred of his friends and associates, and I’ve been given access to his as yet unpublished diaries. Finally, all these years later, the project is beginning to come to life. This essay uses his diaries and a couple of the interviews to revisit one of Monette’s most important books.]
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When Lynes Worked for Pleasure
… I discovered the exquisite work of George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), mostly through my friend and colleague, photographer Duane Michals. I had seen an image or two in exhibits, but Duane showed me a new book by Jack Woody of Lynes’ work, and I became a fan.
MoreJonathan Caouette, Maker of Tarnation
After all those years of experience and personal filmmaking, the thirty-year-old Caouette put his tragic story out there with Tarnation, and the rest is his story. Now a father living in New York City with his boyfriend, Caouette sat down with me during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
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France’s Down Decade
TRISTAN GARCIA’S FIRST NOVEL, Hate: A Romance, has been marketed as a roman à clef about gay Paris in the 1980’s. … [and] tells the story of four French intellectuals who alternate tumultuously between being friends, lovers, and enemies as their lives are affected by the onset of AIDS, the “end of history,” and the assimilation of homosexuality.
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