The Cinesexuals

OPINION: The late renowned actor gave us tough, passionate, and nuanced representations of queer men on screen in an industry that scared cis-het Black entertainers from doing such.

It's Pride Month, as a whole lot of rainbow corporate logos have already told you. It's a great time to march, and to party, and to be marketed to. But it's also an opportunity to learn your queer history, and a self-curated LGBTQ film festival is a great way to do that. Let us help.

The existence of gay-for-pay performers (men who do not identify as homosexual but who perform sexual acts with and/or for other men on camera) complicates even the most basic assumptions and analyses of gay male pornography.

The following dialogue condenses several letters exchanged between us during the evolution of this Special Section on "Gays and Film" and supplements it with excerpts from a taped discussion we had in Montreal in July. We thought it important to bring out some points the articles and reviews only briefly touched on in the Special Section.

The main suggestions I'd like to make in this article about gay male pornographic cinema are quite brief and simple. Broadly I'm going to argue that the narrative structure of gay porn[1] is analogous to aspects of the social construction of both male sexuality in general and gay male sexual practice in particular.

At this point in his career, David Halperin commands attention as one of the leading theorists of gay, lesbian, and queer studies in the United States. Anyone working in these fields will want to consult his latest book How to Be Gay, a vast, sprawling study of the state of gay culture—its history, its permutations over the decades, and its current state of disavowed but enduring relevance not only to gay people but to those interested in “culture” generally.

What follows is an examination of gay motifs and images as they figure in six films by Bernardo Bertolucci—THE GRIM REAPER (1961), BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (1964), RIGOLETTO (1970), THE CONFORMIST (1970), LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972), 1900 (1976).

Gender and queer studies books are famous for apologizing to the various groups they gloss over or exclude. If a study intends to address sexuality, for example, and ends up being mostly about white gay men, reasons are given for leaving out lesbians, people of color, and sometimes the poor. Roy Grundmann’s recent book, called Andy Warhol’s “Blow Job,” is different.

Smallville is a show about secrets and silences. Its multiple narrative threads depend upon a vast and thriving network of lies, secrets, deferrals, misrepresentations, backward glances, and half truths — all of which coalesce, in one way or another, around the character of Clark Kent.

Slowly and delicately drawing attention and care from the audiences, "In the Family" comes to us as a simple story about one family matter. Never disrupting its slow but steady pace throughout its long running time (169 minutes), it gives us a real slice of life through its intimate human drama filled with realistic characters, and there are many scenes deeply resonating with empathy and understanding behind its composed but caring attitude.

Since the revelation that filmmaker James Whale, a member of Golden-age Hollywood, was in fact a gay man; many have examined the late director’s work in search of queer content.

Some film scholars argue that there is a gay sensibility in this film, which in turn triggered a rise of homosexual interpretations of the movie. As a matter of fact, some of the people involved in the production of the film were either homo- or bisexual, including director James Whale and co-stars Colin Clive and Ernest Thesiger. This article is going to explore a homosexual reading of Bride of Frankenstein with regard to James Whale’s homosexuality in the context of queer theory.

Turns out there was a “Demon Twink” out there all along. He was just hiding in a previously believed to be lost film that had stopped circulating in the corners of gay adult films for almost four decades.

Cinemaqueer.com is a collection of over 350 gay themed film reviews that I penned from 1998 - 2015. Many were originally published in Buffalo’s monthly gay newspaper, Outcome.

Not a huge amount takes place at the beginning of Days. The opening exchanges are elemental: wind blows; rain patters; grass shivers; a boy in pink shorts plays with fire. But then not a huge amount happens after. The movie is the latest from director Tsai Ming-liang, a Malaysia-born filmmaker and master of slow burns; and a key figure in the second wave of Taiwanese New Cinema. What Tsai does do–and better than most–is long takes; beautiful compositions; urban bustle; gorgeous color; neon light–as well as capture touch, sexuality and the human body.

Depictions of queer and trans people have been present in the film medium since its inception more than 100 years ago, but due to censorship and varying degrees of prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community at different points in time, onscreen representation has a long, complicated, and often coded history. While gay characters were frequently used for laughs or not explicitly stated to be queer in the earliest mainstream Hollywood films, a brief relaxation in Germany’s film production code in the early 20th century allowed for LGBTQ+ classics like “Different from the Others” and “Mädchen in Uniform.”

For Peck, life and cinema began to blur as friends were drafted into the cast. “There was a real confusion in my mind about whether people were playing themselves or acting out characters.” But the point of the film was never in doubt: “It was to put up on the screen something of that life which I and others were living.”