Mi relación con la rareza y mi relación con el cine es una verdadera situación de «gallina / huevo», aunque conocía mi amor por el cine a una edad más temprana que mi extraña identidad. Pero desde que salí, los dos han sido casi inseparables: a través de la película, he visto lo extraño que puede ser, cómo se vio una vez y cómo se codificó. He visto extrañas historia y política, extraña alegría y dolor, extraña santidad y obscenidad, extraño orgullo y protesta. El cine como una forma de arte que refleja y rompe la cultura en la que se creó puede ser tan ilimitado como la extrañeza misma. Es raro encontrarse latente y explícitamente en el cine si no pertenece a un grupo social dominante. Si tu hacer Encuentra una versión tuya o muchas, se está produciendo un cambio tectónico. Ves el mundo y ves el cine de una manera diferente. Incluso puedes encontrar comunidad. Ese es el poder del cine queer.
En el 50 aniversario del levantamiento de Stonewall, pensé que sería divertido contactar a algunos de los escritores que más respeto y admiro y compartir cuáles son sus películas queer favoritas: todas las explosivas, emocionantes, extrañas, eróticas, cosquillas, extraño, trágico, emocionante cine queer que nos persiguió y nos formó como escritores, como personas queer. Sin embargo, el legado del movimiento por los derechos de los homosexuales en general va más allá de los 50 años. Queer Cinema y los escritores y críticos que lo aman y lo apoyan miran aquí y en otros lugares en el futuro queer, como los íconos Vito Russo y B. Ruby Rich. En lugar de limitar nuestras críticas y películas a solo 50, pensé que era un gesto simbólico aún más grande incluir las respuestas de todos los que se presentaron graciosamente.
Aquí está, niña, aquí está, mundo: más de 50 autores queer y sus más de 50 películas favoritas queer (enumeradas en orden cronológico).
@ Danielortberg;; PizarraEs «amor sabiduría»
Película:
Sylvia Scarlett (1935, George Cukor)
Antes Educar bebéantes La historia de FiladelfiaCary Grant se enamoró de Katharine Hepburn cuando era niño Sylvia Scarlett. Dirigida por George Cukor, quien era el director social no oficial de Hollywood gay en ese momento. Además de la evidente resonancia transmasculina de The Boy Kate, también existe la fabulosa resistencia vocal de Cary Grant cuando se desliza dentro y fuera del acento de Cockney y profundiza en un estado de ánimo T4T maravillosamente confuso entre estafadores y estafadores. (Kate también besa a Dennie Moore solo para mantener el puntaje uniforme).
@jake_pitre;; Catapulta, El globo y el post
Película:
Guitarra Johnny (1954, Nicholas Ray)
La fusión experta de Nicholas Ray del western y el melodrama es una metáfora políticamente agresiva del macartismo, rebosante de una paleta de colores caleidoscópicos y la tensión subyacente (extraña) opresión sexual. Guitarra Johnny examina los estados de ánimo violentos de la masculinidad, junto con la dedicación para explorar el poder del deseo, un poder que puede ser tanto destructivo como generativo. Esto tiene un logro crucial de Joan Crawford, pero también está Mercedes McCambridge, que interpreta a Emma vengativa, un personaje extraño de todos los tiempos, una mujer horrible y vengativa que contrasta maravillosamente con las expectativas que teníamos de un LGBTQ + sin problemas -Quiero presentar ahora. Guitarra Johnny Es un recordatorio de que ser el más liberador del mundo puede ser absolutamente único, pero el peligro está indisolublemente vinculado a este desafío al status quo.
@cinementalista;; Una nueva mirada a los estudios de cine y televisión., Profesor de cine / televisión
Película:
Escorpio se levanta (1963, ira de Kenneth)
Kenneth Angers 1963 cortometraje Escorpio se levanta es un sueño de fiebre húmeda sobre el homoerotismo de los nuevos símbolos de la masculinidad masculina blanca, desde la fascinación por el cuero, las botas y las motocicletas hasta los flexibles pasteles de carne que adornan las «revistas del cuerpo». Pedirle a la audiencia que revise su pasado reciente sugiere que las cosas nunca serán tan fáciles como parecen. Y mientras comienza la asamblea de 30 minutos, estamos desafiados. ¿Por qué los hombres homosexuales se sienten atraídos por las modas que recuerdan a los nazis? ¿Cuándo es escupir un ataque y cuándo es una expresión de sentimiento sexual? (Todd Haynes volverá a esta pregunta en su película de 1991 Veneno.) En las últimas escenas, cuando un papi de cuero derrama un altar católico con entusiasmo apasionante, la ira nos recuerda que el género, la religión, el fascismo, etc. no se trata solo de suprimir la extrañeza en la política, sino también en el estilo. La estética y la política son inseparables. Sin embargo Escorpio se levantaEl verdadero truco está en su broma. Por supuesto, los queers parecen ser expertos en el drama de la moralidad de género y cultural, en el vestuario y la coreografía de las relaciones sadomasoquistas. La animada banda sonora pop de la película es vital a este respecto. Hace que las imágenes sean irónicas y nos enseña que escuchar es tan importante como mirar (y posiblemente podría liberarnos del régimen escénico enraizado en la fetichización de la iconografía por el cristianismo). Escorpio se levantaLas actitudes del campamento mostraron que podíamos destacar del trauma, incluso encendernos y reírnos de él, para modelar una mentalidad que se convertiría en un sobreviviente vital para el resto del siglo XX.
@ Sadfilmmaker;; CARTA GAY
Película:
Desfile funerario de rosas (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)
Toshio Matsumotos Desfile funerario de rosas sorprendido de ver de qué es capaz el cine. Matsumoto se adentra felizmente en la cultura underground de la década de 1960 en Tokio y transfiere libremente la historia de Edipo Rey a la vida de un artista de drag llamado Eddie (interpretado por Shinnosuke Ikehata, también conocido simplemente como «Peter»). Desfile funerario de rosas elude el género, genial entre el negro, las bromas irónicas, el horror, las entrevistas de vox-pop y la locura en la pared, y se mueve a través del parpadeo total de un cuadro a través de la anarquía total entre el melodrama y la surrealidad. Matsumoto utiliza con orgullo el léxico francés New Wave, pero no es suficiente simplemente presentar radicalmente su narrativa. Se sumerge en su trabajo, como la daga que es sangrienta al final de la película, con el espíritu de la realización de películas experimentales. Un personaje que se supone que defiende a Matsumoto y se burla de él al mismo tiempo, un apuesto artista revolucionario con barba que va a «Guevara» muestra a sus amigos sus impresionantes películas mientras se trata de un porro. (La película que ves es en realidad una obra anterior del propio Matsumoto.) Un espectador impresionado y feliz cita la leyenda de vanguardia «Monas Jekas». Este brumoso punto de encuentro captura la experiencia de ver el pensamiento completo de Matsumoto en un microcosmos. His Funeral Parade es un estudio de caso de un libro de texto en danza entre lo que Parker Tyler llamó y habla de las películas de Andy Warhol, «Drag Time» y «Drug Time». Es un celuloide afectado por el nitrato de amilo que nunca debe olvidarse.
@ RebeccaPahle;; Boxoffice Pro
Película:
Algo para todos (1970, Hal Prince)
Michael York encarna la pura energía del caos bisexual en el drama de comedia de la década de 1970 Algo para todos, una de las tres películas del legendario productor / director de Broadway Harold Prince (Cabaret, Empresa, Sweeney Todd, Violinista en el techoy toda una carga de otros). Algo para todosEl cartel canta que el mayordomo de York «lo hizo … ¡todos!» El «lo hizo» es «tener relaciones sexuales», todo con el objetivo de estar en el círculo de una familia austriaca de la posguerra con un gran castillo de mierda y un título elegante, pero sin serpentear. Pero, oh, el carisma de Michael York (y su pene) puede cambiar la cosa de «sin dinero». York es un escalador social con escrúpulos que son tan aburridos como sus pómulos. Él se propone manipular a una condesa (una reverencia fantástica, sin mencionar a Angela Lansbury), su hijo (Anthony Higgins) y su nuera (Heidelinde Weis) en este oscuro pero feliz retozo. Algo para todos se basa libremente en una excelente novela llamada El cocinero por Harry Kressing; Hugh Wheeler, quien escribió el libro para musicales ajustándolo a la pantalla Un poco de musica nocturna y Sweeney Todd, agregó más A) homosexualidad y B) intriga. Que mas necesitas
@AustinADale;; Metrograph
Película:
Basura (1970, Paul Morrissey)
Paul Morrissey Basura se filmó en el invierno después de Stonewall con diez dólares y un rollo de cinta en los sótanos y callejones de Manhattan, pero contiene una de las mejores líneas del cine estadounidense («¡Necesitamos asistencia social y no puedes tener mis malditos zapatos!») y es lo más trágico Logro: El brillante debut cinematográfico de Holly Woodlawn. Describiría la historia, pero como una noche nublada Basura se disfruta mejor sin previo aviso. En el espíritu cáustico de las mejores películas de precodificación Basura revela las verdades de su tiempo y hace que su era sea aún más descriptiva. Me conmovió profundamente desde que lo vi en el sótano de mis padres en VHS cuando era un adolescente. Vuelvo a ello porque ofrece un tutorial sobre la dignidad humana, pero también porque le recuerda al artista que no hay excusas: solo tienes que encender la cámara, seguir apuntando en la dirección correcta y seguir escuchando con atención. Un importante rompecabezas cultural alto-bajo y la obra maestra esencial del cine queer estadounidense. Basura tiene el coraje de salvar al espectador que más lo necesita y el coraje inmortal para destruir todas las ideas de sabor habituales. Ningún volumen de historial queer es satisfactorio sin conocimiento BasuraLa última media hora, e incluso sin ella, no hay una lista completa de las mejores comedias estadounidenses.
@ blakersdozen;; La bestia diaria
Película:
Flamencos rosados (1972, John Waters)
John Waters me enseñó que queer puede ser lo que quiera, incluso una drag queen asesina que come mierda. La preocupación de que soy esto o aquello se está derritiendo de su suciedad divina: sus cejas, su voz, su maldad. Soy modesto en comparación, pero todos sucumbimos al narcisismo de pequeñas diferencias medidas por las personas que nos rodean. Flamencos rosadosEn dos familias que luchan por el título Filthiest Person Alive, se le pide que desate su imaginación y piense en lo extrañas que podrían ser las cosas en lugar de lo aburridas que son. Corre a través de todos los límites del gusto o la cortesía y es la única línea de partida en la carrera que lo ignora. Es lo opuesto a la representación LGBTQ positiva en los principales medios de comunicación. Es la película original de afuera que muestra, mucho mejor que cualquier eslogan de orgullo, que puedes ser lo que quieras, bella y / o asquerosa.
@ ShelleyBFarmer;; RogerEbert.com, Pizarra, Revista de papel
Película:
Yo, tu, el, ella (1974, Chantal Akerman)
Akermans Yo, tu, el, ella Fue la primera película que vi cuando era joven, que se dio cuenta cada vez más de mi identidad bisexual y sintió que tenía mi número. No era solo eso actos bisexualidad, aunque el personaje principal de Akerman tiene encuentros sexuales con hombres y mujeres (con el primero un trabajo manual desesperado; con el segundo una extensa secuencia de comunidad hambrienta). Había visto ejemplos literales de bisexualidad en la pantalla, especialmente el sexo pruriente y sin sangre de Woody Allen Vicky Cristina Barcelona, visto como un adolescente loco por el sexo y trágicamente casto. La película de Varda hizo algo más interesante, más impactante: capturó las cualidades psicológicas y espaciales de la rareza, especialmente la bisexualidad. La primera secuencia de la película, en la que el personaje de Akerman recita letras en voz alta, se acuesta en un colchón en el piso, come cucharadas de azúcar interminables de una bolsa y mueve metódicamente la posición de su colchón en su habitación, utiliza deliberadamente configuraciones avanzadas de movimiento y de sí misma. gesto repetitivo de una manera que crea una atmósfera de anhelo (un estado que todos sabemos es canónicamente extraño). Su cambio constante de posición y los diversos intentos de lograr un tipo de satisfacción (azúcar tragada, muebles recién arreglados) indican una identidad en el cambio. La última escena de sexo entre Akerman y su amante está marcada por un hambre cinética e insaciable por los cuerpos del otro, una explosión de deseo retrasado que estalla en la plenitud de salir.
@schlockvalue;; Instagram: @askanybuddy
Película:
Extraños suceden (1974, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.)
Aunque hoy es difícil de imaginar, las películas eróticas fueron una de las principales formas de los medios gay. Contaban historias gay a un público gay en un momento en que Hollywood estaba más preocupado por la basura Otra historia y Socioy son los precursores directos tanto del movimiento de cine independiente gay a mediados de los 80 como del muy alabado New Queer Cinema de los 90. A la vanguardia de esta transición estaba Arthur Bressan, cuyos ocho largometrajes estrenados en cines borraron las líneas entre lo «adulto» y lo prestigioso, lo privado y lo público, películas que fueron invitadas a festivales como la Berlinale en el extranjero, pero a los Estados Unidos. Las casas porno en casa fueron desterradas.
Su debut, Extraños sucedenHay muchas cosas, un retrato amoroso de San Francisco de la era hippie, un romance, una película porno, pero en esencia es una historia que sale, no solo para el protagonista de 18 años, sino también para el aspirante queer Comunidad en sí misma. No fue la primera película en tratar este tema antiguo (Dick Fontaines) Feliz cumpleaños davy y salas de Gorton El experimento vencerlo por un par de años), es el primero que se siente verdaderamente emocionalmente auténtico y traduce con éxito estos sentimientos entrelazados de liberación sexual y conciencia política que se despiertan en una película. El final, que se filmó durante uno de los primeros desfiles del Día de la Libertad Gay en San Francisco, es emocionante. Una película pionera.
@ryanhoulihan;; El esquema
Película:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman)
Si se libera, The Rocky Horror Picture Show Fue un fracaso. En ese momento, el público estadounidense no era tan musical y definitivamente no acudió en masa para ver cómo un grindhouse tomó el género. Pero curiosamente, la película tomó vida nocturna para extender sus alas. Gracias a las actuaciones de medianoche y el boca a boca, pronto se combinó un culto que combinó señales de arrastre, campamento, llamadas y respuestas y una apreciación genuina por los números de baile y la estética oscura. La historia de la película en sí sigue a una aburrida pareja heterosexual recién casada cuya mente y cuerpo son interpretados (y expandidos) por un extraterrestre travesti y sus amigos de otro mundo. El sexo, las lentejuelas y el rock and roll esperan a los fanáticos nuevos y viejos, pero tenga en cuenta que la experiencia rocosa solo es posible con una proyección en vivo con papel higiénico, confeti, tostadas y guantes de goma.
@ Mikeymusto;; NewNowNext
Película:
Norman … ¿eres tú? (1976, George Schlatter)
Esta comedia de larga duración de 1976 grabó un fracaso de Broadway, afroamericanizó a la mayoría de los protagonistas, y luego de alguna manera fracasó nuevamente, pero tengo una debilidad por sus lados buenos y malos. En la película de George Schlatter (Rowan & Martin’s Reír), Sanford y su hijoRedd Foxx interpreta a Ben Chambers, un hombre apretado que está horrorizado de que su hijo Norman (Michael Warren) sea gay y amigo del animado Garson (Dennis Dugan, quien más tarde hizo películas de Adam Sandler). Stormy Ben está haciendo todo lo posible para enderezar a Norman, incluida la reparación de una prostituta (la estatuilla Tamara Dobson), ¡pero parece que nada funciona! El resultado es, a pesar de todas las bromas y los estereotipos en el camino, de alguna manera positivo para los homosexuales, especialmente desde que toca el ícono del campamento Pearl Bailey Mama, hay partes para Wayland Flowers y su diosa títere Madame, y la diva disco Thelma Houston canta la divertida canción del título «Uno de cada seis». Esta farsa tonta tiene preciosas percepciones extrañas o sensibilidad, pero me encanta, como un par de zapatos fabulosos que no se ajustan, pero que no parecen arrojar. Puede que Norman Chambers no sea perfecto, pero es un mejor ícono queer que Norman Bates, y disfruto el hecho de que Ben se conecta con Garson. Lo mejor de todo, fue bastante atrevido tener una pareja gay interracial en el centro de la película, aunque las multitudes de todas las razas y sexualidades se quedaron en casa en masa.
@ Stinkylulu;; Autor de Números latinos: hacerse latino en la popular actuación del siglo XX
Película:
Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma)
Ninguna película captura la extraña interioridad tan vívidamente como Carrie. Claro, es una película sobre la homosexualidad, pero esta historia de un paria de jóvenes acosados es profunda y realmente extraña para GenX-me. La película comienza cuando Carrie White (la indeleble Sissy Spacek) experimenta la menstruación por primera vez en la escuela y es espectacularmente humillada por sus compañeras («Plug it up!»). Pronto entendemos que todos en su comunidad piensan que Carrie es un extraño y desafortunado monstruo, alguien que es más fácil de ignorar que tratar con amabilidad. Por supuesto, nadie se da cuenta de que la aceleración sexual de Carrie ha activado sobrenaturalmente sus poderes telequinéticos latentes. «Creepy Carrie» es burlado o ignorado por su comunidad; Cuando te saludan a la normatividad (también conocido como «invitado al baile de graduación»), la representación de la tolerancia se convierte en tu propia broma cruel y humillante. Pero Carrie contraataca y manifiesta una visión vengativa de la escuela secundaria como un paisaje infernal antes de que finalmente tropiece en casa para que le recuerden que el hogar extraño y extraño alberga los peligros infernales de todos. Aquí, también, las fuerzas que se activan por la ola de sexualidad en el cuerpo de Carrie demuestran ser más fuertes que cualquier cosa que su comunidad, escuela o familia puedan hacerle, y tal vez por eso lo aprecio. Carrie Entonces, y por qué sigo a Carrie White a través de los medios (novela, varias películas, miniserie de televisión, incluso un musical de Broadway). Cuando Carrie descubre su sexualidad, también descubre su poder para crear otro mundo. Para mí es tan extraño como parece.
@EstherOnFilm;; Medium @ EstherRosenfield
Película:
Hausu (1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi)
Me tomó un par de visitas (y un par de años de autoanálisis) para ver la rareza de este clásico japonés de gonzo horror. La película sobre siete adolescentes que son recogidas de una manera cada vez más extraña de una casa obsesionada es extraña en la forma en que te aferras a las preguntas. Es extraño en su atmósfera y bordes narrativos. La casa no solo está obsesionada por seres sobrenaturales, sino también por el espíritu de venganza de una generación mayor a la que se le ha negado un cierre heterosexual y feliz. El vínculo entre las siete niñas es más que subtextualmente extraño: es representativo de la forma en que los padres cishet estrangulan y pisotean la extrañeza de la juventud. La casa «come mujeres solteras», el horror de la película, llevada por una malicia sutilmente homofóbica. Las fijaciones estéticas de Obayashi también tienen una extraña sensibilidad. Rechaza los dogmas cinematográficos y se entrega a las posibilidades del medio, utilizando todos los trucos y técnicas que pueda imaginar para lograr un efecto divertido y terrible. Es fácil clasificarlo como cursi, pero pocas películas han mostrado un amor tan profundo (y tan extraño) por el arte cinematográfico.
@colettearrand;; El excursionista, ellos.
Película:
Crucero (1980, William Friedkin)
A veces me siento heterosexual, los hombres católicos están en una posición única para hacer películas sobre hombres homosexuales. Era un hombre católico heterosexual, al menos en público, y cuando la vergüenza que me dio mi creencia religiosa no me asfixió, fue erótico. William Friedkins duología gay, Los chicos de la banda y Crucero, son películas muy heterosexuales, muy católicas, una se asfixia y la otra hace cosquillas, y ambos sostienen que los hombres homosexuales, quieran admitirlo o no, deben ser salvados de sus deseos. Yo prefiero CruceroEl hecho de que Friedkin deje caer a Al Pacino en una barra de cuero y lo haga parte de su cultura es una admisión de que estos deseos y su resultado, el sexo anónimo y revestido de cuero del que Pacinos Steve Burns es la mitad, son repelidos. , medio codiciado – son realmente increíbles. Descúbrelo en la universidad después de una conferencia de uno de los hombres que participaron en las protestas contra la película. Crucero Abrí una puerta a una parte de mi identidad que de otro modo no podría descubrir, un momento de claridad, como una afirmación. En contraste con confirmar lo que aprendí de Crucero atascado Me alegro de que así fuera.
@micarbeiter;; Nerdista
Película:
Cielo liquido (1982, Slava Tsukerman)
Sin llegar al borde de las historias tradicionales de presentación, Cielo liquido No hay duda de que el autodescubrimiento está en tu cabeza y, a su vez, ofrece una narrativa correspondientemente confusa. A través de una imagen de secuestro extraterrestre que tiene lugar en la escena del club East Village de principios de los 80, Cielo liquido navega a través del laberinto del despertar de la identidad de género y las colisiones que son inevitables para verte y ser visto por otros. Igual de presente es la magia que surge cuando naces de nuevo e incrustado en el mundo del joven Queerdom. La pieza central de la película, la estrella Anne Carlisle, interpreta a una celebridad del inframundo llamada Margaret y el rival profesional, creativo y romántico de Margaret, Jimmy. Su electricidad en ambos roles, así como la forma desconcertante de los visitantes extraterrestres, subraya principalmente que esta puede ser una aventura confusa, pero también es increíble.
@eric_shorey;; Nylon, Oxigeno, One37PM
Película:
Cielo liquido (1982, Slava Tsukerman)
Los extraterrestres invisibles aterrizan en el techo de un artista e invaden los clubes de punk gay a principios de la década de 1980 para alimentarse de los orgasmos y los niveles de heroína. Un retrato empapado de neón de la escena sin olas, Cielo liquido Los protagonistas se vuelven poéticos sobre el vacío de la condición humana al aplicar maquillaje espeso y reactivo a la luz negra para panqueques antes de interminables noches de baile y uso intensivo de drogas. ¿Los extraterrestres que comen queers son una metáfora temprana y amenazante del SIDA? Lo más probable! En ambos casos, la trama se detiene en varios puntos de la película para ver los desfiles de moda más desgarradores de la historia del cine. Cielo liquido inspiró el movimiento de electroclash de corta duración de principios de los años 2000 y desde entonces ha sido un retrato subestimado de una extraña ciudad de Nueva York que ya no existe.
@oldfilmsflicker;; Fanático del cine
Película:
Corazones del desierto (1985, Donna Deitch)
Si no me hubiera dado cuenta de que era pansexual, Donna Deitch Corazones del desiertoy especialmente la icónica apariencia de Patricia Charbonneau habría sellado el trato. De hecho, estoy seguro de que esta película ha sido un punto de inflexión en la vida de muchas mujeres queer en los 30 años desde su lanzamiento (ver la gran referencia a ella en Desiree Akhavans La mala educación de Cameron Post) Basado en la novela de 1964 Desierto del corazón La película de Jane Rule sigue a una profesora abotonada de la Universidad de Columbia, Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver), que viene a Reno para divorciarse de su esposo y se enamora de una mujer joven de espíritu libre llamada Cay (Charbonneau). Entre la cinematografía con luz de neón de Robert Elswit y la chisporroteante química entre los personajes principales, el exuberante romance de Deitch continúa llegando a los corazones de la audiencia y coloca una serie de luces a su alrededor.
@ Foxe_steve;; Insertar revista
Película: Una pesadilla en 2 Elm Street: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, Jack Sholder)
Cuando gran parte del boom slasher de la década de 1980 luchó con el miedo sexual, Una pesadilla en 2 Elm Street: la venganza de Freddy es una de las pocas películas de terror convencionales que le han dado a la ecuación rareza. Una secuela impetuosa sin la contribución del creador original Wes Craven, La venganza de Freddy rompe la lógica de la Pesadilla Películas donde Freddy aparece en el mundo real: ¡matar en sueños es más o menos su captura! – Pero aparte de su herencia de franquicia, que se basa exclusivamente en el abrazo del guionista David Chaskin con la infame máxima «El subtexto es para cobardes», se ha convertido en un clásico de culto. Con el joven actor Mark Patton (que acababa de interpretar a un personaje gay en otra película y no quería ser escrito) como Jesse, una de las pocas «chicas finales» masculinas del género. La venganza de Freddy transforma al ladrón de sueños con cicatrices en una manifestación física de la sexualidad contradictoria de Jesse, e incluso muestra una escena en la que Freddy mata al profesor de deportes de Jesse en una escena de ducha inspirada en el BDSM, no mucho después de que Jesse lo encuentre accidentalmente en un bar gay. Patton, que es gay en la vida real, luchó con el legado de la película y dejó de actuar en gran medida según la experiencia, pero aceptó La venganza de Freddy como un clásico queer camp en los últimos años. Rara vez la idea de monstruosos deseos se hizo más literal que en el segundo viaje de Freddy Krueger.
@misgenders;; Xtra
Películas:
Moonstruck (1987, Norman Jewison); Violinista en el techo (1971, Norman Jewison)
Aquí interpreto un poco «raro», pero creo que[[[[Camión lunar logra empalar conceptos de amor romántico, compromisos familiares, moralidad matrimonial y convención social sin parecer cínico o descarado. Captura perfectamente lo absurdo y la insensatez del amor heterosexual y al mismo tiempo celebra el poder redentor del buen sexo y la comunicación abierta. Mire en una cuarta cita después de una pesada cena italiana.
Y aunque supuestamente sobre la heterosexualidad, Violinista es obviamente gay Es un espléndido drama musical con altibajos, una adaptación de los clásicos yiddish de Sholom Aleichem (adaptado en Broadway) que cuenta la historia de una comunidad judía rural en los días violentamente decrecientes del Imperio ruso. Curiosamente Violinista se cuenta a través del punto de vista de un hombre, pero los personajes femeninos, una mezcla de estereotipo, parodia cómica, verdadera calidez y matices, son los impulsores de la trama. Una pelicula extraña Violinista permite a la audiencia hacer preguntas serias y crear espacio para conceptos tan grandiosos como tradición, matrimonio, familia y pertenencia. Crea espacio para la complejidad al tratar los problemas que surgen de los tiempos cambiantes y ofrece paralelos a través de los cuales podemos ver mejor las cambiantes costumbres sexuales y políticas de nuestro momento. Pienso mas Violinista Es francamente una lectura importante para comprender el judaísmo subtextual de tantas comedias queer del siglo XX. En este sentido, es un clásico que debe verse de nuevo todo el tiempo.
@bstolemyremote;; Malditamente asqueroso, Anatomía de un grito
Película:
Hellraiser (1987, Clive Barker)
Hellraiser es el debut como director de Clive Barker, cuyo personaje es cortesía de las imágenes de S&M que le dan un tono sexual peligroso. En la superficie, es una película de terror sobre una caja en la que se conjuran cenobitas, criaturas de otra dimensión que infligen dolor y placer a los mortales desprevenidos. Todos se centran naturalmente en Pinhead et. Al, pero lo realmente extraño es el rico melodrama que aparece en la fachada de la humilde domesticidad de la familia Cotton, es decir, la infidelidad, el amor prohibido y la desconfianza familiar.
El instigador de todos los problemas es Frank (Sean Chapman), cuya estética es básicamente «atractivo sexual sudoroso sin camisa». Es la oveja negra de la familia Cotton, un tipo de personaje que folla tan bien que la MPAA ha reducido el número de golpes en su escena de sexo para evitar una calificación más dura.
La víctima / compañera en el crimen de Frank es Julia Cotton, su cuñada. La matriarca de cabello rubí está tan enamorada de la buena polla de Frank que atrae a calzoncillos anónimos a una sala de asesinatos para que su amante de los esqueletos pueda absorber sus jugos y reconstituirse. Es el tipo de historia de «el amor conquista a todos» que solo funciona porque la actriz Claire Higgins está muy comprometida con su mala madrastra. Julia ist wild, sie ist entschuldigungslos sexuell und sie erledigt den Job (nicht weniger mit einem Hammer!). Aus diesen Gründen ist Julia eine echte Diva-Ikone und Hellraiser ein seltsames Meisterwerk.
@bmanuel;; Remezcla
Film:
Gesetz des Begehrens (La ley del deseo) (1987, Pedro Almodóvar)
Almodóvars dampfendster Film beginnt mit einem Mann in nur seinen engen weißen Slips, der sich selbst berührt und sein eigenes Spiegelbild küsst («Denk, ich bin es, den du küsst und du magst es», weist ihn die Stimme eines Mannes außerhalb der Kamera an). Wir schauen uns einen Film in einem Film an. Es ist der erste der vielen meta-textuellen Momente, die diesen Comic-Thriller von 1987 über die unglückliche Liebesbeziehung eines schwulen Regisseurs – eher wie ein Sommerabend – mit einem verrückten jungen Mann (gespielt von einem schwelenden Antonio Banderas, der oft gesehen wird) verankern in nur seinen y-Fronten). Es war nicht mein erster Almodóvar, aber so viele seiner großartigen Bilder drangen in mein Gehirn ein, dass es genauso gut gewesen sein könnte. Fröhlich gegen einen Highsmithian-Protagonisten vorgehen, der die angeblichen Gefahren des seltsamen Verlangens abbaut und verkörpert, Der Ley del Deseo ist ein Arch Noir, der mit kräftigen, leuchtenden Farben bemalt ist und die Sie gleichermaßen erröten und zusammenzucken lassen kann, normalerweise innerhalb derselben Szene.
@ Nathanielr;; TheFilmExperience
Film:
Gesetz des Begehrens (La ley del deseo) (1987, Pedro Almodóvar)
Du vergisst nie deine erste Liebe. Für schwule Cinephile gilt das Gleiche für das erste gebogene Stück Zelluloid. Im Nachhinein ist es einfach, Ihre Favoriten aus der Kindheit in Frage zu stellen, aber ich spreche von dem ersten Stück LGBTQ-Kino für Erwachsene, das Sie als solches erkennen. Eine meiner ersten derartigen Begegnungen war mit Pedro Almodovars Gesetz des Begehrens. Der spanische Autor macht oft visuell ekstatische Filme über Filme, aber er schreibt sie mit der Tiefe und Komplexität eines Romans. Ich möchte mir vorstellen, dass er die Tatsache lieben würde, dass ich mich zuerst in ihn verliebt habe, Text gelesen, gelesen (und wieder aufgenommen) habe Lesen und erneutes Lesen) Die Rezension der Lokalzeitung zu einem kühn schwulen Film, von dem ich überzeugt war, dass ich ihn niemals sehen dürfe. Die Rezension faszinierte und entsetzte das junge Ich mit der Beschreibung einer Szene, in der der Filmemacher einen jungen Mann anweist, gegen einen Spiegel zu masturbieren, und mit den Details der drei Hauptfiguren: eines promiskuitiven schwulen Regisseurs, seines psychotischen Fans / Liebhabers und des Die Transschwester der Filmemacherin spielt nebenbei ihre eigenen inzestuösen Melodramen aus.
Ein Jahr später habe ich den Film gesehen und es war mehr als ich gehofft hatte: die satten Farben, die noch intensiveren Emotionen, die gefährliche Romantik! Carmen Maura weinte, während der Soundtrack versprach: «Du wirst tausend Angelegenheiten haben.» Antonio Banderas mit den Beinen in der Luft. Diese Sehenswürdigkeiten haben mich nachhaltig verändert.
@ Jaymichaelson;; Das tägliche Biest
Film:
Gesellschaft toter Dichter (1989, Peter Weir)
Gesellschaft toter Dichter ist seltsam, wie ich seltsam war, als ich es 1989 sah: verschlossen, sublimiert, überkochend. An der Oberfläche handelt es sich um die Geschichte eines von Whitman / Thoreau / Romantik durchtränkten Poesielehrers (gespielt von Robin Williams), der seine Schüler zu sechzehn am Tag inspiriert. Es ist auch tragisch, Separates StückBromance im Stil zwischen zwei Mitbewohnern: ein schüchterner, ungeschickter Ethan Hawke und ein dünn-hinreißender, angehender Thespian, gespielt von Robert Sean Leonard.
Doch unter dieser Oberfläche ist alles Seltsamkeit, Unterdrückung und Eros. While the “friendship” is never sexualized, Leonard’s character’s sexuality (and Hawke’s intense love for him) is dog-whistled in a way that would’ve made Vito Russo proud: The way he freezes up when a hyper-masculine buddy brings call girls to a Dead Poets Society meeting, his repressed-then-sublimated yearning for poetic self-expression and (spoiler-trigger-etc.) his suicide, which seems under-determined by the overt plot but inevitable by the logic of queerness in the 1950s.
I, too, thought that I was inspired by carpe diem;; I went to college the next year, determined to be a poet and live an extraordinary life. I did end up doing that. But then, why did I also see every play Robert Sean Leonard was in? Why did I, pre-internet, follow the twists of his life in magazines and newspapers? Why was I so focused on living an eros-filled life of poetry, shouting my barbaric yawp, as it were, while my friends were getting laid? For years, Dead Poets was a queer riddle I didn’t yet understand.
@Sam_Moore1994;; i-D
Film:
Edward II (1991, Derek Jarman)
I was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to queer culture that really resonated with me. I don’t remember what it was that got me watching Jarman’s Edward II, just that I was watching it on my own, on a laptop, like it was a dirty little secret. It cast a spell on me: its anachronistic anarchism, a queerness that I hadn’t seen articulated so explicitly before, the beginnings of a fascination with Tilda Swinton that’s never gone away. Edward II showed me what queerness in art could mean, how many different forms it could take. It was tragic, but not in the same deliberate, Hollywood-tearjerker way that films like Milk are. Jarman’s films have always been political more than anything else, so it’s no surprise he brings elements of queerness and punk to Marlowe’s tragedy, with protestors squaring off against riot police, brandishing signs reading “gay desire is not a crime” and “get your filthy laws off our bodies.” Like all of Jarman’s work, Edward II retains a sense of urgency, still necessary viewing for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. Jarman reclaims history, challenging the vilification of queerness and pulling a centuries old text by the scruff of the neck into a modern context. Not “gay” as in “happy,” but “queer” as in “fuck you. “Ever since I first saw Edward II, it feels as if I’ve been lost in its sprawling castle, and I’ve never had any desire to come out.
@Camera_Angel;; Slicin’ Up Eyeballs podcast
Film:
The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme)
I’ve decided to take this opportunity to chronicle my journey of transness through cinema (but I’ll exclude pornography). The most important film is The Silence of the Lambs and its “woman suit” conceit, which, though twisted, resonated with me as a young man desperate to escape masculine expectations. The Crying Game later showed me transsexuality could be beautiful and part of society. The Skin I Live In was a forced feminization tale of dysphoria I fell for instantly. The first film to truly make me question my own relation to gender was Laurence Anyways, if for its utter failure to convey an understanding of trans psychology that even as a then literal man I felt I had. Perhaps still most embarrassing, Frozen’s coming out anthem “Let It Go” stayed insistent in my then-genderqueer head for a few days until I relented and decided to transition. Under The Skin’s uneasy inhabitance of a physical form spoke directly to my still ongoing failure to relate to my body. Both the old and new Ghost in the Shells furthered this thread of eternal discomfort. When this lack of promised new bodily comfort led me to begin to question trans psychological orthodoxy, Dressed to Kill showed me fiction could provide alternatives. At last, a return to the old well of Silence of the Lambs illuminated to me something difficult and unpopular, but something that finally brought me peace through a transition of validity and passing anxieties: Even an ethically sourced woman suit couldn’t put me truly inside femaleness. But that’s OK; a broader lesson of The Crying Game still applies: It doesn’t mean I can’t be a hot trap.
@reverse_shot;; Film Comment, Reverse Shot
Film:
The Long Day Closes (1992, Terence Davies)
The very particular pains and pleasures of the pubescent queer experience have rarely been adequately captured onscreen. Perhaps these tender years need a more abstract approach, one free of linear cause-and-effect narrative and given to the kinds of visual and aural ruptures that only a daringly personal filmmaker can bring. Enter Terence Davies, the great British director who has spent a good deal of his brilliant career exorcising the demons of his Liverpudlian youth in the 1950s. The traumas of growing up gay in repressive England—where consensual sex between men was outlawed until 1967, let’s not forget—and the self-hatred it can instill don’t make for trendy stories of pride, but in this case they do result in something even better: true, honest works of art. Of these, 1992’s The Long Day Closes is the most poignant, an exquisitely beautiful yet unsettling evocation of the roiling internal landscape of a movie-loving pre-teen—Davies surrogate Bud (Leigh McCormack)—who stares out at a confusing world with wonder, befuddlement and desire. The Long Day Closes takes up residence in the in-between space in which queer people (and especially queer aesthetes) often inhabit. For this writer—once a queer kid himself—there’s likely no more powerful or erotic movie image than the early moment in which a shirtless, sweaty yard laborer catches the eye of a young Bud, who’s staring, as he always seems to be, from a window. Caught looking, Bud feels that instant pang of shame, and sinks from the window in embarrassment. Good thing—at least for the time being—there’s always another spectacular Technicolor movie world for Bud to escape into.
@ehnewman;; Los Angeles Review of Books
Film:
Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)
I adored Death Becomes Her when I first saw it as a child, but I only came to appreciate (what surely resonated for me then as) the film’s gay sensibility as an adult. I wanted to live like Isabella Rosselini, dripping in jewels (and nothing else), eternally beautiful and young, attended by a beefcake houseboy in her LA mansion. Fashion, location and taste may change, but the outlines of our desires are a constant, no? I still delight at the razor sharp barbs that fly between aging movie star Madeline (Meryl Streep) and her novelist friend Helen (Goldie Hawn), sterling examples of the acerbic queer humor in which the side-splitting takedown is also an act of love. It’s no surprise that the film has been much adored by the drag community, who find in Streep and Hawn rich possibilities for diva camp. Death Becomes Her also featured ambitious special effects that lent the movie a wonderful surrealism, only enhancing its comedy. I’d rather watch Hawn emerge out of that bloody Greystone fountain, the gaping hole in her stomach framing Streep and Willis like a family portrait, than Robert Patrick oozing into shape as the T-1000 in Terminator 2, which came out a year earlier and set a new standard. If you haven’t seen it, you should. But first, a warning—“NOW a warning?!”—you’ll be quoting it for weeks to come.
@tonyahardingjr;; Lady Science
Film: Single White Female (1992, Barbet Schroeder)
Queer obsession is a fraught topic in both film and politics. The fuzzy, often illusory line between “I want to be with you” and “I want to be you” permeates many queers’ formative memories—the blister-bright nausea of being enamored and hoping, through enough painstaking mimicry, that those feelings will be returned in kind. But that mimicry is itself a spectacular horror, for both the object and the subject. Single White Female succeeds by turning the outsized feelings Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) holds for Allie (Bridget Fonda) into camp-ghastly visuals: nearly matching hairdos, a murdered puppy, Steven Weber’s cock. What could be a better image of soured loyalty than Hedy stalking her imagined cariad with a meathook, eyes dulled like an abandoned dog?
There is nothing graceful about this movie—and Allie’s devoted gay upstairs neighbor may as well be played by an Egg McMuffin. When the right to exist openly is not guaranteed, any film that offers a glimpse of the messier side of queerness, however obliquely, is always a political risk. Queer film is never not problematic, then, especially when it had to adhere to the plodding and pathologizing tendencies of ’90s psychological thrillers. Still, at its best, Single White Female sees some of us queers as we were at our worst: driven to monstrous devotion for people who would have rather kept us as a convenient anecdote.
@worstcinephile;; Wylie Writes
Film:
Batman Returns (1992, Tim Burton)
Tim Burton’s second stab at the Dark Knight is rarely engaged through a queer lens, but the film articulates queer despair and loneliness, as well as politics, in ways that very few A-budget pictures at the time were able to express so discreetly. While I may have—and perhaps should have—picked a more celebratory, upbeat film, Batman Returns is consistently on my mind, strangely enough as a character study, for how it represents so clearly and yet so bleakly the darker side of queer life—failure, abandonment, isolation—and the heteronormative fear of a radical politics so consistently disparaged by the neoliberal centrists who run the show. Unlike a number of Hollywood films, Batman Returns ends rather depressingly: Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) does not end up in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship with Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) after “coming out” as Batman (he ends up, then, quite literally closeted). The leather-wearing Catwoman spends much of the film exacting revenge on predatory men—including Batman himself—after suffering for years as a lonely, cat-owning, plush-collecting secretary. Finally, Danny DeVito’s carnivalesque Penguin, who is abandoned by his wealthy parents in the very first scene, attempts to assimilate politically by running for Mayor (albeit deceitfully), and ends up on a mission to kidnap and murder every child in Gotham City, a direct result of reproductive futurity. While certainly this subtext may invite interpretations of the film as “conservative” or “regressive,” the film’s evident sympathy with its characters (even the Penguin’s death is presented tragically) certainly validates the downside of growing up feeling different and abandoned, especially in the midst of the Culture Wars.
@ghweldon;; NPR
Film:
Careful (1992, Guy Maddin)
Set in a fictional Alpine village so threatened by avalanche that the citizens remove the vocal cords of their livestock, never speak above a whisper and keep their emotions strangled, Careful isn’t subtle about its central metaphor. But then, what self-respecting ultra-low budget parody of German Mountaineering films of the 1930s would be? The forbidden love that drives the plot is Oedipal, not gay, but hoo boy is this movie hilariously, exultantly, bioluminescently queer. When I saw it in 1992, its numerous, exquisitely mannered aspects—acting, directing, costumes, makeup, set design—had me bark-laughing in a nearly empty theater; my fellow audience members were really not vibrating at this movie’s frequency the way I was, and still do, and always will. But it’s the script that’s crawled inside my heart and has taken up permanent residence: “Don’t stand so close to the walnut tree!” “Never hold a baby’s face near an open pin!” “We can live on berries, and grasses, and the small animals we can kill with sharp sticks!”
ArtForum
Film:
Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993, Gregg Bordowitz)
The word “crisis” in “The AIDS Crisis” is an impossible referent, understood as usefully designating a historical period yet also under constant stress to include the present-day inequalities and exigencies of HIV and AIDS. Gregg Bordowitz’s 1993 film essay Fast Trip, Long Drop plumbs the textures of “crisis” more than most other moving-image documents of AIDS and queer culture in New York of the period. Mixing various genres, from documentary footage of ACT-UP marches to scripted send-ups of liberal AIDS politics and stock sequences of demolitions and stunt accidents, the film asks how a community can still learn to historicize itself in the face of its own extinction. Still to this day, Bordowitz’s artistic gift is to find the long histories and theories within even the most immediate hungers of our emotional lives (Fast Trip locates shtetl culture as a curious past cognate of queer experience). His tone is ferocious and analytic, and often funny: Filmmaker Bob Huff caricatures Larry Kramer as “Larry Blamer,” more splenetic patriarch than community activist, while artist Andrea Fraser provides a star turn in her character “Charity Hope-Tolerance,” a PWA and repository for white-hetero projections of HIV/AIDS.
Yet Bordowitz reserves his most cutting introspection for his own effort—a cable TV show he created in 1988 with Jean Carlomusto titled “Living With AIDS.” Softened into a patronizing “Thriving with AIDS,” the program becomes a forum for Bordowitz’s old world world-historical alter ego, Alter Allesman: “I have fantasies of murder,” Allesman boldly confesses on air. “Not famous people, not politicians, movie stars, a no one. Someone I pick up, a trick. I’m fucking him and I’m gonna infect him. The entire purpose of reaching orgasm is to give him AIDS. It’s just a fantasy, just a fantasy, but it’s very important to me to feel like my fantasies are powerful; I desperately need that. If our fantasies cease to be compelling, even only to us, then we’ve lost. Then we’re truly dominated. And I feel that way. I’m no longer a Person With AIDS. I am AIDS.”
@cinematrans;; MUBI, Hyperallergic
Film:
Safe (1995, Todd Haynes)
What happens when you do not know the words to describe what is wrong with you? Carol White (Julianne Moore) rapidly decays into irresolution in Todd Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece in ways that are simultaneously visceral and frustrating. What she believes to be environmental illness, one that has her body rejecting a lot of her femininity and housewife roles, is not as cut and dry as she claims it to be. This leads to a further false path in Louise Hay-inspired New Age thinking, abdicating all autonomy of her body and conscience in favor of positive thinking.
I first watched Safe in college, a time where I was starting to shed my denial of being trans after avoiding it. The film is often synonymous with AIDS allegory, but Haynes also lets that disease exist in his world. Carol’s issue is far more tied to the self. I read Safe as a body dysphoria story. Carol White felt like an unsolicited mirror that I needed at that point in my life, as she was often searching for the words to her problem but then always seemed to avoid the interrogation of the self. But I would come to find the words to describe how I feel and interrogate my problem. Safe as trans allegory might read as a reach for some, but in getting to the bottom of trying to confront the unexplainable in your body and mind feeling at odds, I cannot think of a better film.
@marflukebill;; Field of Vision, filmmaker
Film:
The Cherry Cherry Chainletter Tape, Joanie4Jackie (1995, K8 Hardy, Sara Marcus, et al)
About five years ago—and about 15 years too late—I developed a hard and fast infatuation with the Joanie4Jackie chainletter tapes, a sort of girls-only VHS mixtape delivery service devised by Miranda July in Oregon in 1995. The idea was that July would disseminate a call for submissions through letters and zines, asking young women around the country to send her their films, which she would then dub to a VHS and send to everyone who submitted. The resulting tapes (there were about fifteen before July donated the archive to Bard, where the program was continued as a club) fuse shorts from underground favorites like Vanessa Renwick, trailers for films by Sarah Jacobson (Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore) and queercore hero G.B. Jones (“The Yo-Yo Gang”), and work from rural teens who would never make another film. Everything is so raw, everyone is so young, nothing is clothed in curtains of metaphor or subtext. In one short Tammy Rae Carland uses the camera as a proxy for her mother and comes out to her. These were consistent themes: coming out, speaking out loud, yearning, releasing desire, feeling unsafe and in need of being heard. In addition to the directness, the cut-and-paste aesthetic, born of both necessity and the influence of filmmakers such as Jennifer Reeves and Peggy Ahwesh, was super inspiring to me. It also hurt, to identify so strongly with this aesthetic, these stories that commanded a gender-exclusive space so strongly that to be viewed with “masculine” eyes felt like a violation.
I befriended a recent Bard grad with access to the entire archive, as well as several filmmakers who had been J4J mainstays. We played the tapes at a few DIY venues before the collection ultimately moved to the Getty Museum. A lot of the filmmakers showed up. I tried not to apologize for being the “only man in the room” and failed miserably. They were thankful for the screening, my heart pounded. Look for Dulcie Clarkson and Tara Mateik’s work, as well as Sarah Kennedy’s, for some great gay coming-of-age stuff, in addition to those listed above, but really everything on the tapes is worth watching.
@Lena_Houst;; Film Misery
Film:
Bound (1996, Lana & Lilly Wachowski)
Watching the Wachowskis’ pre-transition films feels like the trans equivalent of early queer-coded Hollywood cinema. It’s hard not to notice the identity exploration and societal anxiety bubbling beneath their grand, sophisticated allegories. In their debut, Bound, though, queer desire is not only foregrounded, but luxuriated in. A pulpy lesbian noir whose sexual expression borders on pornographic, I can imagine queer viewers in 1996 reading this as a scopophilic masculine fantasy by two fetishistic film bros. Seeing it now, though, I can only see it for what it always was: an expression of repressed queer desire from two women tired of being told who they are by others.
There’s an element of performance to most closeted queer life, but flirtatious mafia-girlfriend Violet (Jennifer Tilly) has built her life on performed masculine fantasy. “Let me guess, deep inside you, is a dyke just like me,” lesbian ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon), constantly covered in juicy grime and oil, sarcastically darts at Violet after acting on their sensual, frank foreplay. Corky struggles accepting Violet’s genuine desire becuase of her hetero-appeasing presentation and transactional connection to men—but love isn’t business. It’s not a coordinated exchange of goods. It’s trust: Trusting someone to be who they say they are in close, open quarters. The queer dissonance of Bound is personified by the two apartments the action plays across. One a chic, stainless lie. The other’s a bare-bones, sensually plastered mess. It’s the truth, though, and there’s plenty room to paint on a clean canvas.
@tracedthurman;; Bloody Disgusting
Film:
Scream (1996, Wes Craven)
You can’t tell me that a horror film that climaxes with its two male killers (Matthew Lillard’s Stu and Skeet Ulrich’s Billy) violently penetrating each other with knives isn’t queer. The stabbing so clearly represents their first time having sex with each other (a painful flip-flopping anal penetration for the virginal duo). Even if you don’t read it that way, you can’t deny that there is some definite homoeroticism peppered throughout the film. The video store scene alone, in which Stu fingers Randy’s (Jamie Kennedy) earlobe while draped over his shoulders, nearly cements the former’s queer status. In addition to Billy and Stu, you’ve got queer screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s genius meta dialogue and a fantastically bitchy queer icon in ambitious reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). What makes a fantastically bitchy character like Gale Weathers so queer, you ask? The fact that she embodies the personality traits so many queer people have to learn in order to defend themselves agains the constant onslaught of social ostracism and abuse. We, as queer people, learn at an early age that if you can’t fight with your fists, then fight with your tongue. Gale Weathers (and other fictional characters like her) is the personification of that mantra. So yes, Wes Craven’s Scream is the queer slasher film you never knew you wanted.
@TrevellAnderson;; Out Magazine
Film:
The Watermelon Woman (1996, Cheryl Dunye)
There’s something revolutionary about the idea of reclaiming and asserting one’s history, and that’s exactly what Cheryl Dunye set out to do with The Watermelon Woman, which she wrote, directed, edited and starred in. Known as the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian, the 1996 romantic comedy-drama tells a story hardly ever told. About a young Black lesbian (Dunye) who works at a video store during the day and wants to make a film about 1930s Black actresses who were forced to play mammies, sometimes uncredited, the film explores the diffculties in navigating archival sources that erase and ignore the legacies of Black queer women in Hollywood. The Watermelon Woman is a perfect example of Dunye’s unique “Dunyementary” style, wherein she blends narrative and documentary techniques (with a major assist in this film from director of photography Zoë Leonard). It’s a piece of queer cinematic history that deserves all of the praise.
@woahitsjuanito;; Miami New Times
Film:
End of Evangelion (1997, Hideaki Anno)
The first time I saw Shinji Ikari, I hated him. I hated him because he cried. I hated him because he never knew what he wanted. I hated him because he wasn’t active enough a participant in his own life. I realized years later I hated him because I was him. In creating Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hideaki Anno made an incredibly ambitious show fueled by sheer emotional instability, one that he’d expand and further queer with the masterpiece that is End of Evangelion (which works as either an alternate ending to the series or a continuation of Shinji’s cyclical narrative, depending on interpretation).
Here was a film that took all of the self-loathing, codependency and anxiety from the series and blew it up, having Shinji face everything from his need for physical and emotional affection from men and women alike to the literal end of the world as he knows it, complete with a departure from traditional animation into live-action, bridged together by experimentation in the vein of Stan Brakhage. End of Evangelion works best as a queer horror film, its imagery laden with sex and death, manifestations of desire being skewed by body horror and outright annihilation. What little optimism exists in its frames is short-lived, more interested in reflecting the way its protagonist’s fractured reality—triggered by a war between the beliefs that were imposed upon him with the facts that life has thrown at him—and creating an imaginative realm with which to explore his insatiable need to be both alone and not.
@trishbendix;; The New York Times, them., Tidal, Bustle
Films:
All Over Me (1997, Alex Sichel); Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love) (1998, Lukas Moodysson)
I put these two together because they are that way in my heart: both gritty indies about awkward tomboyish teenage lesbians falling in love with their effortlessly beautiful blonde best friend. The angst of the ’90s is so palpable in every facet of these films—one set in Hell’s Kitchen, the other in Åmål, Sweden—not just in the writing and performances from young, vulnerable newcomers but the soundtracks (riot grrrl and queer folk punk like Ani DiFranco, Sleater-Kinney, Babes in Toyland, Helium in All Over Me, and Robyn’s first big pop hit “Show Me Love” in Fucking Åmål, which was adopted for the American title). Both films expertly conveyed the ache of first love and discovery of sexuality without forcing the traditional tortured “coming out” narrative. The kinds of complicated female friendships turned sexual and romantic are a pinnacle of lesbianism, for better or for worse, and these two films captured that tension.
@KristyPuchko;; Pajiba
Film:
Velvet Goldmine (1998, Todd Haynes)
When I first saw Velvet Goldmine, teen-me was utterly gobsmacked. I didn’t clock that its central queer love triangle was a fantastical re-imagining of the rumors of rock stars David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. I didn’t realize that Haynes had snatched the plot structure of Citizen Kane to unfurl his own tale of ambition gone awry and love lost. I didn’t know what to make of the suggestion that Oscar Wilde wasn’t just gay, but also an extraterrestrial. I was agog at the boldness, glam rock, gender-bending fashion and sex appeal so thick you could practically smell the sweat and lip-gloss. As a baby-bi, I was excited by the sights and the sounds, but not yet ready to confront how deeply I was connecting to the story of a gay teen finding his identity by swooning over rock stars.
Watching it decades later as an adult and out bisexual, I still revel over its allusions, subversions, sex appeal, spectacle, killer songs, as well as soul-quaking performances from Toni Collette, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Ewan McGregor. But I was stunned by how teen-me had missed the point of this movie I’d long loved. It was never really about the rock stars. Velvet Goldmine was about how their story framed the coming out of an average gay teen, played by a wide-eyed and beaming Christian Bale. At its core, Hayne’s glitter-flecked drama is about the confusion, fear, excitement and ultimate liberation of coming out, complete with all the celebratory glitter such an accomplishment deserves.
@_jarking;; AwardsWatch
Film;
Get Real (1998, Simon Shore)
There are few films which so accurately capture the idiosyncrasies of growing up queer in the south of England—perhaps because, for sure, it’s a boring (and specific) setting. But there is Get Real. Not to evoke one of those rancid Twitter memes, but here, the cinematic parallels to my life are omnipresent: the homoerotic banter of the hyper-macho football lads, the facile teachers, the unattainable muses. Shore’s depiction of Little England is one which, for me, quite literally hits close to home. You see, Get Real was shot, and ostensibly based, in Basingstoke, a suburban-come-rural town some 20 miles from my home city of Winchester.
There’s one key difference: For the venemously witty Steven (Ben Silverstone), the twinky protagonist of Get Real, his muse becomes attainable. This is the athletic, archetypal and masculine-yet-sensitive-but-very-fucking-confused John (Brad Gorton). He’s manifestly presented as the ideal, with his bulging muscles, “head boy” badges (as Steven says, “I wish it was an invitation”) and latent sensitivity. It should be very intimidating: After all, there’s nothing that scares gay men more than beautiful male bodies. But it was through John, at least partially, that I could reconcile my outward masculinity to my inward queerness. That, quite naturally, bred a much needed sense of belonging. John’s story is tragic: He isn’t able to reconcile it all. He doesn’t come out. But you know he’d be fine if he did; and that’s partially what hurts, for sure, but it’s also what resonates. Seeing Get Real made me, well, get real.
@carolaverygrant;; Motherboard, IndieWire
Film:
Adolescence of Utena (1999, Kunihiko Ikuhara)
What does it mean to be a queer body existing in a heteronormative space? Nearly every queer film asks this question at some point, but few are about demolishing the heteronormative ideal as explicitly and as proudly as Adolescence of Utena, legendary anime director Kunihiko Ikuhara’s queer magnum opus. A drastically different retelling of Ikuhara’s television program Revolutionary Girl Utena, Adolescence follows Utena Tenjou as she duels the entire Ohtori Academy Student Council in order to gain ownership of the Rose Bride, Anthy Himemiya. But where Revolutionary Girl followed Utena and Anthy’s attempts at actualizing as their full, queer selves within the constraints of the heterosexual environment they’ve been forced into, Adolescence ends with them moving past the bounds of cisheteronormative power structures, complete with astounding body transformations, deeply sensual imagery, gleeful absurdism and Ikuhara’s signature meta-toying with the structures of Japanese animation. Utena and Anthy don’t just break free from the normative standard, but from the film itself, and the result is one of the most joyfully indescribable queer masterpieces of all time.
@tymitchellxo;; The New Inquiry
Film:
All About My Mother (1999, Pedro Almodóvar)
Perhaps a queer film is about diva worship. Perhaps it’s about sapphic divas. Perhaps it’s about trans women. Perhaps it’s about a queer director, and that’s all it takes. Perhaps it’s about sensitive boys who die young. Perhaps it’s about hustlers and hookers who bandage each other’s wounds. Perhaps it’s about surviving sickness, especially when it’s not your own. Perhaps it’s about AIDS. Perhaps it’s about running away, and running back, and away again. Perhaps it’s about the spotlight. Perhaps it’s about the dressing room. For me, I believe any great queer film must be, at its damp and velvet core, about my mother.
@pilotviruet); TV Guide
Film:
But I’m A Cheerleader (1999, Jaime Babbit)
I have a memory of secretly watching But I’m A Cheerleader on my computer, quietly crying in the middle of the night. There’s a scene in which Graham (Clea DuVall) and Megan (Natasha Lyonne) have sex for the first time: “I’ve never felt this way before,” Megan tells her, “Except for when I was cheerleading.” Of course it’d eventually become obvious why I felt so overwhelmed but, at the time and with no blueprint for queerness, my totally rational response was to join my school’s cheerleading squad. What I’ve always loved about But I’m A Cheerleader, besides every single thing DuVall does, is the way it found humor in something horrible (and how it emphasized the darkness through bright, garish hues), a trusted defense mechanism. But I was also obsessed with how comfortable Graham felt in her gayness, a concept that both seemed utterly foreign to me and gave me something to strive for. I kept returning to the movie, looking for clues to explain why I was so drawn to it; to be honest, I didn’t even register how important it was to both my queerness and gender identity until I was an adult and read this beautiful essay by Brad Nelson. Eventually, I did get it—and also learned that I was, without a doubt, a horrible cheerleader.
@nico_lang;; NewNowNext
Film:
Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001, Alfonso Cuarón)
I saw Y Tu Mamá Tambien with my mother. I was a freshman in high school dressed in Goodwill clothes, and an older classmate with cool girl bangs recommended it to me. She had seen it at the one theater for arthouse films in downtown Cincinnati, frequented by college students and other strangers who aspire to casually use mise en scene in a sentence. Because I was 14 and young for my age, I asked my mother to rent it for me from the video store where she worked. She had never heard of it before; her tastes skewed toward Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts.
To approach a film like Y Tu Mamá Tambien—a Mexican neorealist sex romp turned existential travelogue—through the lens of memoir might seem a paltry response to its brilliance, but one’s favorite queer film is a reckoning with time. It is dependent upon where we were in our lives when we happened upon Parting Glances or Go Fish, what we brought to the experience with us.
My own bisexuality was just on the tip of my tongue the day I put the VHS in our combination VCR/DVD player. I had only been presented with two options: fishing and hunting with my stepfather or Will and Grace, a show I still love deeply. But there was never a sense that my own queerness could be mapped out for myself, that I could be a different kind of queer person than the handful of options I had presented. It was just more hand-me-down clothes that didn’t quite fit.
Like Alfonso Cuaron’s later Roma, Y Tu Mamá Tambien is a film about many things. It examines political and class divides in Mexico at the turn of a new millennium. It’s an incisive look at the aggressive posturing of teenage masculinity, in which young men objectify the women around them as a thinly veiled mask that obscures how utterly terrified they are of them. But even more than that, Cuaron’s first masterpiece is about two best friends fumbling their way out of the tunnel of late adolescence, momentarily finding each other’s bodies in the darkness.
The plot is simple enough: Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) meet an older Spanish woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), at a wedding. Undeterred by the fact that she is Tenoch’s cousin’s wife, they invite her to a secluded beach they call “Heaven’s Mouth,” one they made up just to impress her. To their surprise—and ours—she accepts. Luisa has cancer and is looking for somewhere to die. The journey to their nonexistent paradise becomes a tangle of confused feelings and buried sexual longing, one eventually culminating in the film’s literal climax: a threesome between Tenoch, Julio and Luisa. The longtime friends share a long kiss just as the image fades to black.
Tenoch and Julio aren’t gay, and they end the film still identifying as straight men, but many of the best queer films aren’t explicitly queer. Instead they teach us something about ourselves and our own desires. For me, it was a glimpse at the freedom to make mistakes as we try to become the people we will be.
@georgeciveris;; Columbia Journalism Review, stand-up comedian
Film:
The Dreamers (2003, Bernardo Bertolucci)
When I was 13, I walked to the video store a block from my family’s apartment and spotted an orange-tinted DVD cover featuring three hot people (two men and one woman) looking horny, naked and bored. A matter-of-fact critical blurb seemingly unconcerned with its subject’s artistic merit simply read, “A steamy, erotic thriller.” The steamy film in question was Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Much like the dreamier of its two male leads, the version I rented was uncut. At one point in the film, one of the men slits a banana vertically in half by plunging his finger into its head. In another shot, the woman appears in nothing but a white bedsheet balanced on her waist and black evening gloves, resembling the Venus de Milo (a note: being attracted to men is gay, but being attracted to Eva Green is queer). One of the men is American and the other one is French, as is the woman, who is his sister. They all take a bath together. The French woman removes the American man’s underwear, revealing a small photograph tucked underneath his half-erect penis. Earlier (or later, I can’t remember) he masturbates in front of a poster of Marlene Dietrich, who comes to life, takes a drag of her cigarette, looks me right in the eyes, and says, “Honey, you’re a faggot.”
@jshawhan;; Out and About Nashville
Film:
Tropical Malady (2004, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
With its bifurcate structure, this film presents that quintessential emotional tangle as both the internal (youngish love, the mesh of another’s musics, idyllic pursuits, the occasional organic ritual of folklore) and the external (siege mentality, the ultimate unknowability of another, the perpetual lurk of isolation). It’s a queer work of art by one of the greatest living directors, and it resonates continuously in the viewer. It’s a more versatile Gerry, to name another beloved queer film by another queer director, and though it doesn’t fill the vessel of personal experience as viscerally as The Master or To The Wonder, to name two deeply queer films made by straight people, there is a magic in Tropical Malady that I wish for everyone.
Honorable mentions: Urbania, The Servant, Score, Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby, Women in Love, Grace Jones: A One Man Show, Taxi Zum Klo, Addams Family Values
@JimFarmer3;; Georgia Voice, Out On Film
Film:
Mysterious Skin (2004, Gregg Araki)
Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin—based on the novel by Scott Heim—is my absolute favorite LGBT-themed film. A never-better Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a hustler whose life eventually crisscrosses with a young man (Brady Corbet) who he first met as a boy. The performances are exemplary, with supporting turns by Elisabeth Shue and Mary Lynn Rajskub. The first time I saw this I literally almost lost my breath; it’s emotionally devastating at times. Yet despite its grim subject matter—sexual abuse—it’s a lyrical and hopeful film, one about the connections we form with others, intentionally and unintentionally.
@josesolismayen;; The New York Times
Film:
Undertow (Contracorriente) (2009, Javier Fuentes-León)
I first watched Javier Fuentes-León’s Undertow in the aftermath of an intense, but short-lived, romance. He was an American doing humanitarian work in the Third World, I was from the Third World and at age 24 it seemed like I’d never live anywhere else. When he left, my heart left me. It was the last time I cried. So watching the forbidden affair between a small town, married, fisherman (Cristian Mercado) and the light-skinned painter Santiago (Manolo Cardona) visiting from the capital hit a bit too close to home.
Sensually shot by Mauricio Vidal, who captured the beauty and danger of the sea, and sensitively acted by Mercado and Cardona (Ledger and Gyllenhaal who?), Undertow showed me that sometimes films can provide the answers your soul is seeking. Fuentes-León captures the intense pain of lost love, while highlighting the importance of community. I don’t know if Undertow is necessarily my “favorite” queer film (that title would probably go to The Wizard of Oz, which I can recite from beginning to end) but it’s certainly the one that’s haunted me the most. Unlike the man who got away, Undertow lives within me.
@wjmcentee;; The Brooklyn Rail
Film:
Beginners (2010, Mike Mills)
No widower has rejoiced as gleefully as Hal Fields. Not that his wife’s passing was any reason to celebrate, but it (macabrely, humorously) offered him a few, remaining months to embrace his queerness and become a jubilant fixture in LA’s vibrant community of middle-aged and older gay men. As Hal, Christopher Plummer’s dive into the dating scene, attempts to understand house music and coming out to his son—in a purple sweater!—is utterly delightful. The film is a quiet testament to second chances, acceptance and unbridled joie de vivre, even as Hal’s heath wanes. Beguiling without becoming too twee, the film also has one of the best meet-cute scenes in recent memory, with Ewan McGregor and Mélanie Laurent connecting at a Halloween party over a dog, a therapist couch and laryngitis.
@benfraserlee;; The Guardian
Film:
Weekend (2011, Andrew Haigh)
Given the relative scarcity of gay content in my youth, I became accustomed to settling for very little. A homoerotic overtone, a mournful glance, a grotesquely exaggerated stereotype—all felt like something yet also nothing, a cruel tease of representation that was still far out of reach. But then in 2011, I sat down to watch Weekend in a busy London cinema surrounded by other gay men and found myself somewhat overwhelmed by the time it was over.
While I’d spent a large portion of my life desiring any form of multimedia gayness, my youthful curiosity had admittedly swayed toward more carnal gratification. Watching Andrew Haigh’s lo-fi drama, I realized that, above all else, I was really craving the chance to experience big screen same-sex romance. His naturalistic, impeccably acted film about two men sharing a first, and probably last, weekend together is a woozy, hair-raising mosaic of intimate moments, relatable to anyone experiencing that initial rush yet, more importantly, it was relatable to a gay man like me. It might not seem as defiantly queer as many films on this list, but in portraying gay love in an unfiltered, unabashedly tender light, it remains quietly radical nonetheless.
@cinemabite;; The AV Club, HuffPost, TV Guide
Film:
Tomboy (2011, Céline Sciamma)
Some of my most vivid childhood memories are tethered by a sequence of emotions: complete freedom followed by immense shame. No film has captured that experience as palpably as Tomboy. Céline Sciamma’s tender look at a child’s exploration of gender identity follows Mikael/Laure (Zoé Héran), a French 10-year-old assigned female at birth who introduces himself as a boy after moving to a new Paris suburb. Mikael spends his summer playing soccer with the neighborhood boys, slowly taking his shirt off as he shyly enters the game. He proudly surveys his new short haircut in the mirror, crafting a mustache out of the trimmings.
The first time I watched Tomboy I was early into my transition as a trans adult, and I cried thinking back to my younger self. I felt that same elation and freedom on the days I ran around my Southern California cul-de-sac as a kid, playing shirtless alongside my brother, and again when one day I took a pair of scissors to my long hair and chopped it off. But similar to Mikael’s experience, my actions were eventually met with reproach from a mother embarrassed to see her child dressing and behaving like a boy.
Sciamma’s film isn’t a perfect trans or gender nonconforming narrative—the ending suggests Mikael’s (who now goes by Laure again) gender exploration was just a phase, and as a cis filmmaker, Sciamma can only uncover so much about the experience of growing up as a gender nonconforming kid. Still, it’s a film that intimately gets what was going through my head as I stood in the mirror and smiled, looking at the kid with jagged short hair who looked a little bit more like me.
@renjender;; The Village Voice
Film:
Concussion (2013, Stacie Passon)
“Not the Will Smith movie,” I explain when telling people about writer-director Stacie Passon‘s debut (which premiered at Sundance in 2013). Ironic, considering the main character Abby (a spectacular Robin Weigert, the therapist in Big Little Lies) throughout this film so clearly gives no fucks about any man. Abby’s a stay-at-home mom married to another woman, a sexually indifferent divorce lawyer, in wealthy, suburban New Jersey. When Abby’s son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, Abby calls him a “little shit,” and decides to go back to work in an unrealistically white New York City, renovating and then flipping a loft. As the loft becomes more presentable, Abby, after a couple of encounters with sex workers, becomes one herself, inviting women into the loft’s big bed.
Passon lived with her wife in the suburb and house where much of Concussion takes place. After her son hit her with a baseball, Passon didn’t become a sex worker, but did start writing this film. Concussion’s satire is full of insider detail, like the way the housewives obsessively exercise (in slow motion, with Bowie’s “Oh You Pretty Things” synched to their yoga poses and spin classes) and fixate on interior design (the wrong wall tile interrupts a sexual encounter), but Weigert’s Abby, whether in the city, wearing her CBGB shirt and a smirk of disbelief, or in suburbia freaking out her straight writer-friend with the taboo dreams she’s had about motherhood, has a lived-in sexiness that makes this film a classic.
@roughschrade;; Slate
Film:
First Period (2013, Charlie Vaughn)
A low-budget, gay, high school romp, this cheap and tacky film captures all the most playful aspects of camp. Writer and star Brandon Alexander III fills the movie with life, playing new girl at school Cassie Glenn, who is determined to ascend the ranks of popularity. The jokes are unceasing, the acting slides between brilliant and dreadful with ease, and it’s clear everybody involved had the best time making it. It’s the first thing I suggest whenever we’re having a movie night.
@ZacharySire;; Vice, Str8UpGayPorn
Film:
Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)
In recent years, Scarlett Johansson has come under fire for playing characters of different ethnicities and gender identities than her own, but I’ve never felt more connected to the character she played in 2013’s Under the Skin: An alien masquerading as a Scottish woman who uses her perceived sexuality to lure horny young men into an alternate reality where they are killed and their bodies are harvested to fuel an extraterrestrial universe, or something. To be clear, it’s not the sex (or the murder!) that makes Under the Skin a queer masterpiece, it’s what happens in the movie’s third act—when Johansson’s alien character begins to see itself as human—that makes it so relevant for anyone who’s ever struggled to assimilate in a society to which they’ll never belong. As the alien abandons its deadly mission in favor of attempting to live a mundane human life, carrying out basic human routines and forming basic human relationships, it eventually faces a tragic demise while realizing that it will never fit in. I’m not saying that growing up as a closeted gay boy in Orange County, California in the 1980s is the same thing as an alien trying to live as a woman in modern day Scotland, but Under the Skin is an artful (the score, sound, cinematography are gorgeous) and horrifying cinematic reminder of the devastating consequences one might face while pretending to be something they are not.
@willow_catelyn;; MUBI
Film:
Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)
An explicit transgender cinema does not exist. Historically we have had little to no control over the images of us that were presented in movies. To this day, there is still very little in the way of literal representation of transgender people on screen. It is essential to take transgender cinema and make it our own, as specific as a personal gender identity itself. For me, Jonathan Glazer’s, Under the Skin is the closest I have come to seeing a cinematic interpretation of how I process gender and sexuality. On the surface this movie isn’t about transness at all, but predator-prey dynamics and black widow spider mentality as science fiction, until those roles reverse in an empathetic twist that ends in violence. But it isn’t that simple. How the creature, played by Scarlet Johannson, who has taken on the form of an attractive woman, attempts to understand her new gender and her new body is directly synonymous with trans femininity. It doesn’t matter whether or not this was intentional, because transgender women have reclaimed the movie as theirs. The cinema of transgender people must operate in this fashion, because if it didn’t, we would have no stories, because Hollywood has only ever been interested in corpses, fools and monsters.
@jourdayen;; Bitch Media
Film:
Bessie (2015, Dee Rees)
Dee Rees’s melancholic erotic imprint is visible on all of her films, from the lesbian coming-of-age drama Pariah to her most mainstream feature, the Southern Gothic drama Mudbound. Her sophomore feature Bessie combines the queerness of her first feature with the sweaty Southern emotional desperation of her third. The Bessie Smith (Queen Latifah) we see at her most passionate is surrounded by women, whether it be her lover Lucille (Tika Sumpter) or her mentor Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique). Rees depicts Rainey’s relationship with Smith as a queer mentorship; Rainey teaches Smith how to be bravely perform her sexuality on and off the stage. One scene shows Rainey dressed in a suit and top hat covertly hitting on Smith. Once she is rebuffed, Rainey takes to the stage and reveals herself, effortlessly switching between the fast-talking man and the woman he’s done wrong. Bessie captures queer relationships with black women while also depicting the different ways black queer women can perform their gender and sexuality. Rainey is the stud, Lucille the femme—Smith fluctuates between both, often angsting over which one she should be. Bessie has all the trappings of a biopic with the rhythms of fascinatingly bittersweet queer journey.
@katienconnell;; Another Gaze
Film: Mommy (2015, Xavier Dolan)
Xavier Dolan’s Mommy is a near-Baroque contemporary drama laced with dystopianism and soundtracked by late-’90s/early 2000s pop-rock hits. It’s also Dolan’s film with the most conceptual mileage. Set in St. Hubert, Québec, Mommy centres widowed single mother Diane Després (“Die” for short—played by Anne Dorval) and her sometimes violent teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) who has come home from a recent stay at a state funded hospital in which he violently injured another boy. In her struggle to manage Steve’s aggression, loss and loneliness, Diane seeks out help from their neighbour Kyla (Suzanne Clement), a quiet, preppy math teacher in a drained-of-life heterosexual marriage who Diane watches from her basement window. As they work together to care for Steve, Diane and Kyla become a pseudo-couple and their mutual desire simmers under the surface.
It’s moving to see all three characters grow through their precariously stitched-together kinship, and though it’s heartbreaking when the family fantasy falls apart, this resonates with the social impositions that often prevent queer love from being realized. While I think Dolan intends us to think about parents and their children, the ambiguities between Diane and Kyla have lingered for me with far greater intensity over the years. Ironically, Mommy is Dolan’s film that gives the least explicit attention to LGBTQ characters or issues. But it’s in the ways director and performers implicitly connect ideas and feelings about desire, power, class, and family that Mommy becomes Dolan’s most transgressive and nuanced queer film to date. Some genuinely exciting camerawork, stylish costumes and an unforgettable lip sync to Céline Dion’s “On ne change pas” also make Mommy worthwhile.
@helenafleabody;; them.
Film:
The Duke of Burgundy (2015, Peter Strickland)
Everything I know about cinema, I learned from queer pictures and their lash-batting to earlier, straighter-laced movies. That my film studies education is as inverted as I am was once a source of much unpleasant self-flagellation: Why couldn’t I have learned sensibly and chronologically, like a proper critic? Citizen Kane before, not after, Velvet Goldmine;; The Beguiled (1971) before The Misandrists. I’ve since accepted this fate as a sensibility and an asset: I love it when an art film—say Carol, The Heiresses or Knife+Heart—satisfies my hankerings for a risque queer world apart, and then blesses me with a series of referenced films to see after the credit cascade.
In the case of The Duke of Burgundy, I was blessed with a whole new genre: giallo. Peter Strickland’s third feature is set in a world void of men and ripe with mannequins and kaleidoscopic sequences. At once period and contemporary, two entomologists, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), conduct a regimented sadomasochistic relationship in the privacy of their tellingly tidy villa. Gradually, the performativity unravels and we realize that power is wielded by an unexpected party. While it’s not a film for those desiring blunt-force romance and sweet nothings, The Duke of Burgundy does nail the miscommunications and erotic frustrations that occur in relationships—both vanilla and spiced—between women. The same goes for its Jesús Franco homage.
@YesItsAlistair;; Film Inquiry
Film:
The Duke of Burgundy (2015, Peter Strickland)
As Hollywood’s representation of LGBT relationships frequently go out of their way to appear heteronormative to appease the conservative mainstream, it’s only a slight surprise that the most emotionally rewarding recent depiction of queer relationship dynamics can be found in a homage to the European softcore porn of the ’70s. Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy may be riffing on the exploitation films of Jess Franco via the tortured chamber drama of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, but it’s no arthouse exercise in refining the trash of the past through the lens of something altogether more respectable.
It’s the rare example of a very specific genre homage that firmly grounds its fantasy world in something more emotionally tangible: a kinky throwback on the surface that couldn’t feel further removed from an artificial construct when examining the very concept of fetish, and how this can affect the balance in a relationship when this desire isn’t shared. Prior to the film’s release, Strickland stated in interviews that he didn’t want to reveal his own sexuality, simply because that ambiguity could lead to his film being read in two different ways. But there’s no overbearing male gaze to his film in the way his comment implies there could be if read in a certain light—it’s an unmistakable work that, beneath the human toilets and boot polishing, finds something heartfelt and profound to say about modern queer relationships.
@RichJuz;; Jezebel, Slate
Film:
The Duke of Burgundy (2015, Peter Strickland)
By venerating labels and exposing their shortcomings, Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy cultivates a thoroughly modern fluidity despite its ambiguous setting of somewhere in Europe at some point in time. The sexual dynamic of principals Cynthia (a world-weary Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (a batty Chiara D’Anna) initially seems clear—the former the top, the latter the bottom. But soon, it’s clearly opaque as we find out that Evelyn’s actually directing things, bottoming with such force that she’s actually topping. But the screw turns some more and suggests that in bottoming through topping, Cynthia’s submission is the real driving force, thus rendering her a dom top who sub tops. The layers are endless, just like in life. Alternately absurd and desperately sad in its depiction of what people will do to hold onto love, The Duke of Burgundy marries high cinema sensibilities (Buñuel and Fassbinder are both clear influences) with Eurosleaze (the dreamy atmosphere and lurid sex are ripped out of the book of Jess Franco). The result is a movie that is at once trashy and profound, a perfect metaphorical depiction of great gay sex.
@plentyofalcoves;; StrucciMovies
Film:
Pee-wee’s Big Holiday (2016, John Lee)
The first time I saw this film it was such a pleasant surprise! I’m not concerned with palatability of queer representation in art, but I still enjoy accessible and less sexualized representations and wish I had more access to them when I was young. But certain silly and unpretentious renditions of queer romance in films intended for children and families have fallen short and read as saccharine to me, or have read as so polished and wholesome as to be totally alien to my own experience. To see a film that is sweet, charming and whimsical, and for it to be truly bizarre and singular with so many formal experiments and gags that are so weird or so drawn out they could read as off-putting to an unprepared viewer (the alien! the balloon gag!), and for the driving narrative pull to revolve around a crush between two men, was and continues to be a delight.
@gabebergado;; Teen Vogue
Film:
Other People (2016, Chris Kelly)
Chris Kelly has gotten a lot of buzz this past year for the hilarious Comedy Central series The Other Two and his 2016 film Other People is also a fantastic piece. David (Jesse Plemons) navigates various forms of queer trauma, including a breakup and his father’s refusal to accept his sexuality. But at the center of the movie is David taking care of his mother dying from leiomyosarcoma, played brilliantly by Molly Shannon. The movie deftly balances grief and humor (and features an iconic dance scene with Josie Totah) as David deals with his personal problems while also coming to terms with what losing his mother might mean. It’s set in Sacramento, too, so think of it as an older, gay Lady Bird.
@NielsPutman;; Filmmagie, Kortfilm.be
Film:
BPM (2017, Robin Campillo)
It’s not the loud voices of protest in Robin Campillo’s political film that echo long after the end credits grace the screen, but it’s arguably its equally radical emotional core that makes the biggest sound. BPM focuses on the ACT UP Paris movement of the early ’90s, tracking the effects of their manifestations both politically (raising awareness to a vital cause that was being neglected by the government) and emotionally (within the internal structure of the family-like group). Acting up bears chaos and adrenaline, and the filmic antidote to these energetic highs lay in the tender love story between Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) and Nathan (Arnaud Valois). Their very first sex scene is one of the most intimate and raw portrayals of lovemaking between gay men ever put on screen, and a key example of the authenticity Campillo strives for. That Sean is HIV-positive doesn’t reduce the scene’s erotic tensions, nor its romantic values; a spark of truthfulness that rings even harder when destiny strikes during the film’s tragic end and the notion of the LGBTQ+ community as “a chosen family” grows as fundamental as its upfront political context. BPM is therefore not solely a crucial addition to queer cinema and its inevitably grim AIDS chapter, but also carries an inferior statement that redounds living as a queer to something political in itself.
@tvoti;; Vox
Film:
Hereditary (2018, Ari Aster)
Is Hereditary my favorite queer film ever made? Nah. Is it my favorite trans film ever made? Also probably nah, but there are times I think it might be. Ari Aster’s 2018 horror movie is, viewed through one light, the story of a trans guy who really committed and got the body he’d always dreamed of. Even setting that aside, it’s a movie about demonic possession, which isn’t like being trans but is like being trapped inside a body you don’t really understand or want and trying to claw your way out of it, which we can relate to. And like so many accidentally trans movies (unlike the mainstream, cis-approved Oscarbait Danish Girls of the world), Hereditary is a movie that seems to have started from a cis director muttering to himself, “Hm. Bodies are weird!” and then every trans film fan shouting, “YES THEY ARE!” and just going to town. (The trans YouTube critic May Leitz posted a terrific manifesto on the film, and journalist Sasha Geffen talked to other trans Hereditary fans.)
I had seen many movies that connected to my own transness before Hereditary, but I came out in March 2018 and Hereditary was the first movie I saw that I realized I was explicitly enjoying on some level that was solely because I was a trans person. In its meticulously constructed world and its tiny dollhouses, I recognized some part of the rigorous order I had tried to impose upon myself before the walls of my own gender started coming down. And as the movie is smashed to utter pieces in the final third, where some critics felt the film went too far into the supernatural and surreal, I saw some reflection of my own ridiculous journey. To become myself, I had to destroy something else. Hail Paimon. Hail me.
@valeriecomplex;; StyleCaster
Film:
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Céline Sciamma)
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about two women who fall in love with art and one another. Under the veil of romance is also subtle commentary about societal hierarchy and how women circumvent it. While the film takes place in the 18th century there is also something modern about the characters and the way they rebel against the patriarchal pressures of womanly expectations. Portrait doesn’t go out of its way to proclaim its queerness, it just is—and that is so refreshing.
@ABaran999;; Queer/Art/Film; The Creative Resistance
Film:
I Am a Woman Now (2011, Michiel van Erp)
Michiel Van Erp’s glorious and glamorous 2011 documentary tells the story of five pioneering European trans women who were among the first to undergo gender confirmation surgery with Dr. Georges Borou in Casablanca in the 1950s. Returning to their respective countries, the five subjects became cabaret superstars, got embroiled in tabloid scandals, and wound up living uncharted lives—and aging very gracefully, very tastefully and very fabulously, which is so much fun to get a glimpse of. “Is there anything you would do differently?” one of the women asks the legendary April Ashley. “I would like to have been more rich,” she replies, sipping champagne and looking ever the picture of the grand dame she is. The greatest thing queer documentaries can do is open our eyes to the histories that so many people—both straight and gay—have gone to great lengths to hide. Van Erp’s extraordinary documentary brings April, Colette, Jean, Corinne and Bambi’s stories out of the tabloids and puts them in their rightful place as trans pioneers vital to global queer history. It’s never been released on DVD in the United States, but I hope someone eventually will. Hint, hint!
Querido Dan: Soy una mujer heterosexual de unos 40 años y madre soltera. No he conocido a nadie en años. Si bien extraño las citas, el mayor problema en este momento es que mi deseo sexual está fuera de las listas. Mientras que ver porno y masturbarme después de que mi hijo se duerma ayuda, realmente quiero que me folle un chico que sabe lo que está haciendo. Probablemente podría ir a un bar o Tinder y encontrar un hombre para una aventura de una noche, pero dudo en hacerlo. Para complementar mi complicada historia de fondo, tengo antecedentes de abuso sexual infantil y solo he tenido dos parejas en mi vida, una de las cuales fue abusiva. Mis incursiones sexuales anteriores no fueron particularmente satisfactorias, debido en parte a mi falta de experiencia y comodidad, lo que indica lo que me gusta / no me gusta, y cierta disociación durante el acto real. Siempre pienso que sería más fácil encontrar una trabajadora sexual que «se rasque la picazón» porque una trabajadora sexual masculina probablemente sería más abierta, positiva para el sexo y con más experiencia. Pero no tengo idea de cómo proceder o cómo es el procedimiento o la etiqueta. Y me temo que podría ser arrestado por publicidad ilegal en mi conservador estado sureño. Tener problemas podría tener un impacto devastador en mi vida y definitivamente perdería mi trabajo. Intento sopesar los pros y los contras, pero me siento abrumado. ¿Algún consejo para una chica que quiere ser follada pero no está segura de cómo hacerlo en una habitación segura?
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