The Cinesexuals

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.”