THE 35th ANNUAL New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival—better known as NEWFEST—ran from October 12th to 24th, 2023. Over 120 films were presented in the full gamut of genres in several venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, with national availability via streaming services. NEWFEST touts itself as the “largest presenter of LGBTQ+ film & media and the largest convener of queer audiences in the city,” and who am I to doubt this claim? The menu was too large to taste more than a sampling, but to give you just a soupçon: Going to MARS: The Nikki Giovanni Project, about the African American poet, writer, and activist; and Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a rich accounting of the glamorous 20th-century gay photographer’s marvelously theatrical images in velvety black and white. The shorts covered an array of issues, some poetically, like “The Dalles,” others comedically, such as “EITR,” a little gem about a modern American Muslim selling scents in the family store while eyeing any man coming through the door, and while keeping his fashionable mother at bay, especially her customary desire to fix him up with just the right girl. Here, then, are some thoughts on a mere three of the feature films or miniseries that were on offer. All three have received considerable attention, much of it favorable, and all are readily available on the small screen (though Lie withMe and Nyad were first released in theaters). Finally, all three use flashbacks and flash-forwards to juxtapose two periods in the characters’ lives, possibly with an “All is vanity!” subtext. THE EIGHT-EPISODE MINISERIES Fellow Travelers written by TV and movie writer Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, episodes of Ray Donovan and Homeland), examines the attraction between two men employed by powerful U.S. senators during the 1950s Red Scare. Hawkins Fuller (“Hawk”), played by Matt Bomer, is a highly placed staffer for Senator Wesley Smith, a principled opponent of anti-Communist demagogues like Senator Joe McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn. Timothy Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) is a junior staffer in Senator McCarthy’s office and a practicing Catholic; he’s loyal to his boss out of a sense of duty. Hawk meets the younger Tim, correctly sizes him up as gay, and confidently assumes his sexual prerogatives, informing Tim that from now on he’s “Skippy.” Discretion is the watchword in the paranoid atmosphere of the day. While both men remain closeted, Hawk’s seductive domination of the nice Catholic boy leaves little to the imagination. But temperamental differences, and opposing political and moral values, eat away at their mutual desire and shaky sense of trust. Hawk marries Senator Smith’s conventional daughter, the attractive Lucy Smith, at which point the rebuffed Tim enlists in the armed services. A similarly mismatched couple offers an intriguing counterpoint. An AfricanAmerican newspaper reporter working the Capitol beat, Marcus Gaines, a manly closet case, falls for a black drag performer, Frankie Hines. Succumbing to the brash and overt Frankie challenges Marcus’ masculine Black identity. The eight episodes track Hawk and Tim and Hawk’s marriage to Lucy, cutting to flash-forwards set in the 1980s, in San Francisco, where Hawk has tracked down Tim, who is dying of AIDS. (No spoiler alert: we learn this early on in the series.) The series tracks the intersecting paths of the two men through the intervening decades. Individual episodes examine the deceptions and lies of the closet and the ethical compromises that ruin friendships, scar marriages, and damage sons and daughters. Bomer gives a strong rendering of a deeply compromised man, while Jonathan Bailey (of Bridgerton fame), his handsomeness disguised behind large glasses, wears The Presence of Things Past ALLENELLENZWEIG FELLOW TRAVELERS Multiple directors Created by Ron Nyswaner LIEWITHME Directed by Olivier Peyon TDSProductions, Canal+, Ciné+ NYAD Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin Netflix Originals Allen Ellenzweig is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye. FILM May–June 2024 47 Left: Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey inFellow Travelers. Right: Victor Belmondo and Jérémy Gillet inLiewithMe.
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