Category Archives: Film

A Sustainable Queer Planet? 14th Annual National Queer Arts Fest opens in SF

Philip Huang performs June 9 & 10 at Eros

We have made it this far. What next? How can we keep what we have created and protect it for the generations coming up? The theme of this year’s National Queer Arts Festival is A Sustainable Queer Planet. Presented by The Queer Cultural Center, the festival includes 22 venues and runs for a month. An array of performers, poets, writers, visual artists, musicians, comedians and dancers work through diverse notions of sustainability. Organizations, collaborations, friendships, political movements, publications, networks, connectivity, intentional communities, Queer families, and various ecological and economic interventions are all well represented in this month-long festival. High Holy Homo Days are upon us!

Watch this space for notices and commentaries on select individual programs. Philip Huang, pictured above, performs in Formerly Known As: Performances by Male and Trans Sex Workers. This two-day program, hosted by Kirk Read, takes place at The Center for Sex and Culture, and features a different line-up each night. It includes writers, performance artists, comedians and a slideshow of visual work. For a complete listing of festival offerings, visit The Queer Cultural Center’s site here.

Friday the 13th is So Gay…

Cinema taught me how to become the person I wanted to be…

Mickey Chen, center, poses with the two leading actors from the director’s 2007 short film Fragile in Love.

Author, gay activist and documentary filmmaker Mickey Chen is a friend of a friend of this site. Thanks to Guo-Juin Hong of Duke University for this one! Chen’s best-selling book Taipei Father New York Mother is coming out as a film. Both are semi-autobiographical and based on Chen’s difficult family background. Chen recently talked to the Taipei Times. He has described cinema as his “mother” and explains: “Children from dysfunctional families have different ways of licking their wounds. My brother is addicted to gambling, my older sister died of an overdose, and my younger sister spends her life in the frantic pursuit of love. I choose to hide in the abstract world of literature and the arts. I became parentless at the age of 10. Cinema taught me how to become the person I wanted to be.” Good stuff. For the rest of the interview, click here.

May the 4th STILL be with you! Great Gay Portugese Androids. #maythe4thbewithyou

Gay Androids! From the Portugese comics/cosplay site Cinemaxunga. Worth a visit!

May the 4th be with you…Star Wars is so Gay. #maythe4thbewithyou

the lady is dead

I am stunned by the visuals, and wanted to share:

in a comment thread elsewhere, a young charming Canadian man adds this:

I’ve noticed that most queer groups or queer subject matters in videos that talk about love and getting the “person” to love them back don’t show it. like they can walk around in high heels and tights but to show them kissing another guy or sing about loving another guy is still taboo. I like [this video] cause they show it.

*smooch*

Your KC ‘mo, Gryphon

InMediaRes presents the works of John Cameron Mitchell. Hedwig, Shortbus, Rabbit Hole. Future of the Book.

John Cameron Mitchell. Photo: Jack Pierson

InMediaRes is a Media Commons project that provides a forum for on-line scholarship and critical engagement with the emerging media reformulations of the Book. Each week, a scholar or team curates a short video clip or slide show of still images and presents it with a short, critical, impressionistic response. Other scholars respond with commentary.

This week, Michael O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg of The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh curate the Work of John Cameron Mitchell. With three feature films to his credit, Mitchell is finally generating the volume of critical response he has long deserved. To read the commentary and join the conversation, click here.

Harry Potter and the Homoerotic Subtext

 From friend of this site Maestro Roberto-Juan Gonzalez. And, yes, he really is a Maestro: conducts an orchestra in formal Leather, and has a seriously twisted sense of humor. Thanks, Roberto!

Oldest Munchkin is not only merely dead, he’s really most sincerely dead.

photo credit: Charles Sykes / AP

Meinhardt Raabe, best known for his role as the Munchkin coroner in the Wizard of Oz, has died at age 94 at Orange Park, Florida. Mr. Raabe delivered the immortal lines: “As coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.” According to the New York Times obituary, Raabe “was also a wartime aviator and the first Little Oscar, the mascot of the Oscar Mayer meat company.”