‘Only Here to Sin’
TWO ARTIFACTS of LGBT popular culture in 2021 feel like déjà vu all over again, particularly evoking the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Each in its way has been a stake through the hypocritical heart of America’s religious Right. …
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Fathers and Sons
Review of Falling,directed by Viggo Mortensen, and Palmer directed by Fisher Stevens.
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Workin’ It
We Are Who We Are and Industry run parallel in many respects. Both cross the lines of the professional and the personal and offer further evidence of queer youth culture’s dismissal of sexual identities, as words like “gay,” “straight,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “trans” go unmentioned.
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Those First Tries at Love
Review of the films Summer of 85 and Cicada.
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You Never Heard of Simeon Solomon?
The big discovery for me was Simeon Solomon (1840–1905)— a name I didn’t recognize—who had two works in the Yale show: Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup (pen and ink, 1859) and Bacchus (oil painting, 1867). With a little research, I found that Solomon, younger than the first wave of PRB artists, was considered an equal by his peers.
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Two Tales of Two Hollywoods
Circus of Books and Hollywood, a documentary and miniseries, respectively, share an interest in the margins around Tinseltown, especially its LGBT subculture and what “hustling” means in various forms.
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Tiger Mania Uncaged
With its alliterative subtitle, “Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” Tiger King is a true crime show that filmmakers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chailkin assembled out of footage stretching back five years. It’s Duck Dynasty meets Shittown (a must-hear of the early podcast era that also spotlights a redneck’s queer quirks and criminality).
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Leave the Beaten Trail in Tel Aviv
SUBLET BELONGS to a small genre of movies that chart a love affair whose arc rises and falls within a narrow window of time from first meeting to final farewell. It’s all telescoped into a period of days rather than months or years—or even into a single day, as in the 1995 film Before Sunrise and its two sequels. all directed by Richard Linklater. In the case of Sublet, the action takes place over a period of five days which are conveniently numbered, dividing the film into five acts.
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Bollywood Steps Out
Released in February, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan tells the story of two young gay men who are determined to defy parental and societal expectations and mold their own happily every afters.
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Echoes of Andy Warhol, Curator, at RISD
My research has turned up the fact that a number of paintings are of Rhode Islanders from past centuries. One striking example is an oil portrait of Christiana Carteaux Bannister painted by her husband, Edward Mitchell Bannister, in 1860. Carteaux Bannister was an abolitionist and a successful businesswoman who was part African-American and part Narragansett Indian.
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