LGQBT

The Short-Lived Lives of TV Lesbians Plus "Juicy" Vegan Baking at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival

Brandon Judell — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:07:47 +0000

The Short-Lived Lives of TV Lesbians Plus "Juicy" Vegan Baking at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival Brandon Judell October 17, 2024 - 11:07

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Bulletproof Documentary

"How many LGBTQ Film Festivals are currently screening queer carryings-on on Planet Earth?" you ask. According to Wikipedia's listings, which I deem quite thorough yet incomplete, there are 179.

For example, the East Village Queer Film Festival is nowhere to be found on the list. That event should be nestled between South Africa's Durban Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Japan's Ehime LGBT Film Festival.

Anyways, this here is an amazing development, especially for those of us who've grown up when the closest to queer representation was watching Paul Lynde center-spaced on Hollywood Squares.

Host Peter Marshall: "Paul, what is a good reason for pounding meat?"
Paul Lynde: "Loneliness."

Those were the days when we gays didn't really have a language to define ourselves. Now, we have too many choices to keep track of. "Heteroflexibility," for example, sounds more like a contortionist act than . . . . Well, you look it up.

All of this leads us to the 36^th edition of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (September 11-22, 2024). With 97 films from 25 countries, you can bet that every LGBTQQIP2SAA conceivability is represented in many a tongue with many a tongue.

One of the more consequential offerings, one that should be scheduled in every college course dealing with gender, is Regan Latimer's endlessly droll, always astute work of media scholarship, Bulletproof: A Lesbian's Guide to Surviving the Plot. Beware, this doc comes with an on-screen warning: "The following contains scenes of graphic violence and coarse language. Viewer discretion is advised. Also, this film does not claim to be the definitive authority on every queer experience known to humanity. It's just a single, sparkly drop in a vast ocean of queer stories." But what a drop!

With seemingly hundreds of clips dating from the 1950s onward, Latimer maps boob-tube and celluloid lesbian invisibility, stereotyping, and murder all the way to the recent decades' life-affirming depictions. Yes, you'll travel back to your memories of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969-1978); Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983); Fried Green Tomatoes (1991); Bound (1996); Glee (2009-2015); and, of course, Orange is the New Black (2013-2019).

Indeed, there was a time, Blanche, when the majority of lesbianic love stories wedging their way into teleplays would all end on a tragic note. Just visualize sweetly saying goodbye to your "gal pal" and then, within seconds, watching her being fatally struck by a car with a smile still on her lips. Hundreds of other lesbian characters have been offed by Hollywood since.

But it took the blotting out of three popular lesbian TV characters in 2016 within just several months for Bulletproof to be born. "Hey, what the hell!" As one interviewee suggested here to the director: "They should get all the dead lesbians together and put them in one movie." Instead of a cemetery, call it a "Sapphotery."

Employing animation, a first-rate narration, plus tête-à-têtes with actors, showrunners, academics, and your everyday lesbian TV viewer, Latimer has created an at-times surprisingly laugh-out-loud exploration of the devastating effects that an insensitive depiction of minorities can have on how society treats the same. Best of all, she details how the current cure (e.g., Gentleman Jack) was achieved and must still be nurtured.

But with the ACLU now tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills in the States, this doc's hope is stated thusly: "You know, now we find ourselves in mainstream culture, but in real life, it's just pretty scary. What I hope is that straight people who are watching queer media will say, 'Oh, that is a shared human experience. I can appreciate that,' and then get to the point where 'Hey, this isn't, you know, a person who's so different than I am.'"

The Proof of the Pudding film still

On the other hand, writer/director Suçon's 16-minute short "The Proof Is in the Pudding" ("La Cerise sure le Gâteau") might convince the very same folks that queer femmes are quite a bit different at times.

Financed with aid from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a group of San Franciscan activist-drag-nun-satirists), plus donations from dozens of others including Betty La Pisseuse and Lulu Moustache, "Pudding" is the perfect repast for those hungry for Sex on Wry.

The storyline is quite simple. Two friends are invited to a party. Their one chore is to bake a vegan birthday cake.

Now let’s meet the leads: Milly (Faye Darling) is a Brit dating someone named Arthur. Her pal Lise (Mia Nitrile) is French, delightfully tattooed, and quite hard to definitively label from the footage we’re supplied with. No matter. She, however, does "lesbian" quite well.

Puzzled by their assignment, the duo wonders just what goes into a vegan birthday cake. Immediately, they google and discover Simon Cusine (the glorious Théo), who has created a video for just such an occasion. You’ll need icing, sugar, coconut, and a bunch of dry ingredients, plus he insists, "JUICE."

Now the gals are ready to bake, especially because they have all they need for a tasty batter except for the "JUICE," which, for some reason, they assume means vaginal juices. Now, how do you get a cup or two of that specific liquid? Simple: you get horny, and the rivers will eventually flow.

But how do you get horny?

First, these determined lasses try individual masturbation, then paired masturbation, and finally, energetic smooching, oral sex, scissoring, and some thumping maneuvers. Clearly, nothing you’ve witnessed on The Great British Baking Show.

But it all works out. Yes, the cake is baked, the gals get clothed, and they go merrily on the way for a night of partying.

Having never personally experienced 14 minutes of continual fooling around and not being a voyeur, I found I had time midway to toast and butter an English muffin in the kitchen without losing the plotline.

Clearly, the talented, witty Suçon, who's an audacious member of the Parisian porn collective La Branlée, has created a sex-positive offering that will serve as a learning tool for lesbians-in-training, fodder for Julia Childs fans and as a refresher course for the already initiated.

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The Horrors of “Ganymede” Plus Queer Daisies & Lesbian-Attacking Grocery Bags

Brandon Judell — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 17:59:00 +0000

The Horrors of “Ganymede” Plus Queer Daisies & Lesbian-Attacking Grocery Bags Brandon Judell September 6, 2024 - 13:59

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If Roger Corman (e.g. Attack of the Fifty Foot Cheerleader (2012) had produced a film about the complexities of coming out or if Bruce La Bruce (e.g. Hustler White (1996)) had directed a seemingly straightforward narrative about homophobia in a small town, Ganymede might have been the result.

Yes, this often-heartfelt exploration of a young wrestler from an EXTREMELY religious household, one who's seeking his first same-sex kiss, is in the end a hoot and a half. Coming to that realization, though, might take you through two or three Twizzlers and a handful of popcorn. Indeed, all the vicissitudes of confronting one’s queerdom in a family that starts praying against Satan at breakfast over pancakes are achingly chronicled here with a touch of the horrific.

The opening: It's 1989 and an unknown gent with a heavy brick tied to each of his arms, jumps into a lake. Very Virginia Woolf.

Skip to the present day: an attractive, bare-chested high schooler, Lee Fletcher (Jordan Doww), is darting through town under a starry night as any athlete might. He, however, decides to also to jump into a lake where almost instantly he beholds a blurry vision. Underwater he silently screams.

That won’t be the last of his shrieks.

You see, Lee is the only son of the town’s county commissioner—a homophobic, head-thumping, Bible-verse-quoting zealot. The young man's high-strung mother who has a meltdown at the thought of an LGBTQI-soul breathing within 20 feet of her yard isn’t much more comforting. No wonder that as Lee falls into love and desire for an openly queer schoolmate, Kyle Culper (the seductive Pablo Castelblanco), he starts hallucinating that monsters are closing in on him and bathroom sinks are gurgling up blood.

Could it get worse? Of course. When Lee's caught nuzzling with Klye, Dad sends him to the local rabid pastor (David Korchner) who isn't much of a help. He's just rubbing salt into the lad’s already festering mental wounds.

Pastor: Lee, do you have feelings for that boy?

Lee: (Silence)

Pastor: I believe we are dealing with a Ganymede.

Lee: What is a Ganymede?

Pastor: A Ganymede is an unrepentant homosexual, usually a man or boy who is uncommonly beautiful, and they're so deeply entwined with demonic forces that their homosexuality begins to take over and attract others with uncontrollable same-sex urges . . . demonic disturbances.

Add a few electroshock treatments, a bit of midnight toilet-stall cruising, plus Kyle's inability to wear a shirt for more than five minutes at a time, and you have a feature that might resonate with you for days and days. It has for me.

What's odd here, though, is that if you edit out about 22 minutes of Ganymede, you could wind up with a highly persuasive ad for conversion therapy groups. Ah, but those 22 minutes make a whole world of difference. Instead of burning the RuPaul poster over your bed, co-directors Colby Holt and Sam Probst's highly entertaining Ganymede might just have you running out the door in search of a same-sex hand to hold whether you are queer or not.

Covering similar ground at this year's East Village Queer Film Festival, but without the monsters, was Nicholas Hansell's highly effective short, "Flowers." Here another winsome high-school youth, Josh (Rocco Roberts), a soccer player, is yearning to connect with an openly gay peer. How does we know the object of his desire, Eddie (Henry Leith), is openly queer? Well, he's reading a book daily while sitting with his back against a tree. That sort makes you wonder if any heterosexual has a library card.

With time ticking away—the film's only 20 minutes long—Josh has to go to a party and kiss a girl in a bathroom without causing himself or anyone else to barf. Why? He's trying to prove to his sports-mate (Blake Weise), a hunky homophobe, that he's not that way. Can true boy-on-boy love win the day before the end credits roll? Well, with the aid a whole lot of daisies, a happy ending blooms forth and a nice career ahead for the director, who's currently working on a feature, seems assured.

Hansell, formerly a location scout for several features, noted at the talkback after the screening that Brokeback Mountain was a major cinematic turning point in his young life. He didn't, however, reveal if he identified more with Ennnis Del Mar or Jack Twist.

Also screened that night was writer/director Nicolle Marquez's 5-minute "Thank You," possibly only the second eco-friendly, explicitly lesbian offering I’ve ever viewed.

The first was Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkles' documentary, Water Makes Me Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure (2019). Besides shining a light on how bottled water companies are destroying the environment and where California waste matter goes after being flushed, the directors of Wet, for our benefit no doubt, supplied highly detailed examples of how women can have sex in a lake without disturbing aquatic life.

Back to Marquez, who grew up in Puerto Rico and has her second Master's Degree In Gender studies.

In "Thank you," she avoids all mentions of H2O. Instead, she plays a gal awaiting in her apartment for her date, portrayed by the truly stunning lass Andrea Reyes, who arrives with wine and some other goodies in plastic bags.

IN PLASTIC BAGS? OH NO! HOW COULD SHE?

Marquez's distraught character runs into the bathroom, slams the door, and starts smoking. Meanwhile, Reyes' charmer, not sure of what just occurred, meanders into the bedroom, lies down, and feels up the coverlet without being aware that her plastic bags are coming to life. Before you can scan your organic plums at Whole Foods, both gals are suffocated to death, a fitting reminder that the world’s population utilizes 5 trillion plastic bags a year. That's a 160,000 a second, dental dams not included.

By the way, the audience laughed hysterically throughout these five minutes. I though hid in fear under my seat due to my severely underdiagnosed plastophobia.

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Ganymede is currently available on Cable and Digital VOD, including Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and Prime Video. Thank You can be sought out at numerous upcoming film festivals, including The New York Latino Film Festival; PrideFull Film Festival; and Reel Q: Pittsburgh LGBTQ+ Film Festival.)

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Portrait of the Artist as a Work of Art

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 18:45:14 +0000

Portrait of the Artist as a Work of Art Chet Kozlowski June 17, 2024 - 14:45

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Director Agniia Galdanova's new documentary Queendom profiles Jennadiy (Jenna) Marvin, who is young, queer, and suppressed in her native Russia. Films about drag have become a burgeoning genre, but in this case, the notion of "drag" isn't big enough. We need a new category. Jenna Marvin's work transcends drag into performance art.

Her staged public performances are meant to mock, shock, and provoke. She herself is impossibly tall and impossibly thin. Her costumes are intricate constructions, combining forms of nature, science, and pantomime. Elongated extremities. Arachnid movements. Hair a nuclear explosion. Jenna descends from ceilings, crawls from holes, glides down escalators, slithers through subway cars. "I'm an anomaly," she says, a strange visitor from another planet.

"When I go out in character, I'm on top of the world," she proclaims. One would expect, then, a certain joie de vivre. Through much of Queendom, however, her demeanor is dour, even despondent.

It might be because she's living with her grandparents. Grandpa wants her to spend less time on her costumes and more on her studies, and she freaks out when Jenna is expelled. Grandma just wants peace. She calls Jenna "my little oddball."

It might be that she lives in Magadan, a soulless, snowbound industrial port town that used to be surrounded by prisons.

It might be the disdain. “You’re in the boonies now,” says her companion. “You’re obviously going to be met with aggression.” Men smirk as she walks by in full regalia. Jenna is berated and abused, at one point punched in the mouth by a random passerby. A neighbor yells down as she walks past her apartment window. “You’re a man. Act like one.”

It might be the isolation. The film spends much time with Jenna by herself, and her loneliness is palpable.

It might be Russia itself. Even in this modern day, it is illegal to be queer there (one of the fascinating aspects of the film is how much license Jenna is afforded in daily and night life, and for how long).

It definitely is politics. The film’s action happens under the shadow of Putin's regime. As a companion tells him, “Aggression is on the rise here. We have fear and subservience in our DNA.” Jenna attends (towers over) demonstrations such as for the release of dissident Alexei Navalny, navigating past lines of police, her costume in stark contrast to riot gear.

Ms. Galdanova has said in interviews that the film is timed to Jenna's "public coming out." It's not an easy process. She's booted from a supermarket (the cops say because children are present), threatened, insulted, even assaulted. In Moscow, Jenna receives validation. Auditioning for a runway show, she elicits a gasp from the fashion designer Alexandr Rogov. "A real-life monster!" he exclaims, excited that she'll represent his brand.

Jenna's plight is meant to be disturbing. When Queendom turns to a protest against the war in Ukraine, it becomes more than that. Her costume is special, an expression of truth to power. Preparing, assistants wrap her near-naked body in lengths of industrial fence wire, a body-crown of thorns. Tines stab her. "Does it hurt?" the accomplice asks. "Just do it," Jenna snaps. At the rally, Jenna is arrested. The courts will decide her fate.

Agniia Galdanova has directed other features about escape: Out of Place (2017) and One Step Forward, One Step Back (2020), about a family's dream to live far from civilization in the Altai Mountains. Queendom was conceived as part of a docuseries on drag queens but became a freestanding feature. She shot for two years, off and on, intrigued that a location like Magadan, so remote and haunted by the "historical weight" of Stalin-era prisons, could produce such an artist. It's to Ms. Galdanova's credit that she had started filming Jenna Marvin before her self-exile.

Queendom can be viewed as a plea for LGBTQ+ rights and for the freedom of the artist. It exists as a snapshot of resilience in an era of uncertainty that comes with change. In the end, Jenna is emblematic. Her final “costume” will stun you.

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Queendom. Directed by Agniia Galdanova. From Greenwich Entertainment. 2023. In select theaters and on VOD. 98 minutes.

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Queer Love in a Fish-Processing Factory

Brandon Judell — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 21:39:50 +0000

Queer Love in a Fish-Processing Factory Brandon Judell March 23, 2024 - 17:39

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As the closing credits of Norwegian Dream roll up the screen, the singer Girl in Red lets loose in a gently loving voice:

“I’ll never get

Bored of lookin’ at you

‘Cause every time, I see something new

Like the scar on your spine

You fell off the roof when you were nine

You lived a life before me.”

If that doesn’t strum your romantic inner chords, there’s a postscript missive from the director exclaiming Norwegian Dream is “[d]edicated to those who fight for the right to love,” which seems vastly preferable to a similarly worded message connected to the Beastie Boys.

All of this portends that the white lead character, a highly attractive, 19-year-old closeted Pole named Robert (Hubert Milkjowski), will wind up having a satisfying, life-long relationship with Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland), the black, adopted son of the white owner of the fish processing factory where everyone we meet basically works. Did I mention Ivar has an affinity for drag?

Now, I only mention skin color here because there appears to be at least an iota of racism and homophobia in Norway, according to this movie, and a whole lot of brutal anti-queer feelings back in Bialystock, Poland.

Well, documentarian Leiv Igor Devold begins his engrossing narrative feature debut with Robert in his hoodie on a boat headed for Oslo. The young man arrives successfully and is soon wheeling his baggage along barren roads to the fishworks, where he strips in the locker room with his fellow workers. Before you can spell “S-O-C-K-E-Y-E,” he’s cutting up large slabs of salmon.

If love weren’t enough, there’s a secondary plot involving the exploited factory workers preparing for a strike, which will place their livelihoods in jeopardy. If this all seems a bit bewildering, and I’m not sure why it would, but you never know, just watch the trailer.

Anyway, while knifing the fish and during breaks, Robert, who has an affinity for Robert Downey’s Iron Man, thus adopting the star’s first name, becomes more and more aware of Ivar. This awareness is mutual, and a “friendship” grows.

Eventually, Robert asks, “Why are you doing drag?”

Ivar: Didn’t you ever want to be somebody else?”

As noted, Robert wanted to be Iron Man . . . and also have his own gas station in Oslo, while Ivar wants to be a star.

No wonder the duo winds up kissing each other, but can their lips compete with workers’ rights?

Mr. Milkjowski, who can be quite charismatic at times, is also a fine actor. You’ll be significantly concerned for his Robert’s happiness throughout.

As for this being another “coming-out film,” there seems to be more need for such plotlines. As Armistead Maupin noted, “The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.” Norwegian Dream will be an incentive for many more to do so.

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(Norwegian Dream, for a mere pittance, can now be viewed on YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, and Apple TV.)

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Princes, "Bottoms" and I Married A Dead Homosexual

Brandon Judell — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 21:24:43 +0000

Princes, "Bottoms" and I Married A Dead Homosexual Brandon Judell September 18, 2023 - 17:24

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Scene from Bottoms

A few weeks back, I was chatting away with my well-off, ardently Republican, impenetrably heterosexual nephew in his souped-up Land Rover. (Let's call him Chad.) After picking me up at the Croton Falls train station and blathering on about the state of our kin, Chad changed topic and began insisting that nowadays gays had everything they had ever wanted.

Trying to lay out the reality in an even-tempered tone, I noted this sentiment was not exactly true. There were hundreds of laws just been passed or were about to be passed in numerous legislatures across our Great Land with the single-minded goal of making every member of the LGBTQI community into a third-class citizen. Would he like me to email him some articles?

"No! I don't need articles," Chad exclaimed. "I see The Gays on all the TV shows and commercials."

Well, who needs legitimate news sources when you have Botox ads and Modern Family reruns? And Chad does supplement his LGBTQI education by watching Fox so he can get deliciously freaked out about trans folk. For my nephew, hearing the likes of Greg Gutfeld trash a trans athlete supplies the same immeasurable joy he gets from multiple viewings of Saw V.

But Chad has a point, limited as is most of his points. One of the only shows I binged on recently that was decidedly queerless was Season 1 of The Bear. Though to be honest, that series moves so briskly there might actually have been some nonbinaries hiding behind the brisket.

Even on Broadway this past year, you seldom could throw a CD of Judy at Carnegie Hall without hitting an actor currently portraying a bisexual, a gender-expansive, or an old-fashioned lesbian: Bad Cinderella, Once Upon a One More Time, Fat Ham, & Juliet, Some Like It Hot. The list is longer than the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Indeed, I'd bet you all the smoked lox in Zabar's that if you tallied up each and every queer character appearing just this week alone on cable, on regular TV, on New York City stages, and Netflix, they'd outnumber all of the LGBTQI fictional mortals that sauntered through the 1970s, 1980s, and half of the 1990s combined. Yes, even with Richard Simons and Pee-wee Herman included.

Also, it should be noted that back then most of the queer characters depicted were white and male, closeted, had AIDS, or were closeted and had AIDS. There were some exceptions though to these heartfelt and necessary offerings. Among those broadening the landscape were the likes of John Waters, Greg Araki, Donna Deitch, Chantal Akerman, Paul Morrisey, Cheryl Dunye, and Isaac Julien.

A true example of how far we have come, and which some may consider as an example of coming too far, is Wei-Hao Cheng's Marry My Dead Body (2022), a Taiwanese highlight of the recent New York Asian Film Festival and now on the aforementioned Netflix.

Before we go on, please note there is a Chinese tradition called "ghost marriage" where at least one or both of those being wed are deceased. It's sounds ideal. No more hurt feelings over forgotten anniversaries. No blanket-tugging or fortissimo snoring at night. No one yelling at you about your inability to be sexually intimate before breakfast.

One of the main reasons this procedure came about is that it solves the embarrassment for a family of having an unwed daughter or a way for a lineage to continue if one's son is pushing up daisies. Yes, the wife of a defunct spouse could now adopt a child to carry on dead chap's name. (Wikipedia will explain it to you in more detail.)

Anyway, Marry My Dead Body begins with a wolf howling on a full-moon night. Soon after we meet a cute homophobic cop, Min-Han (Greg Hsu), who immediately roughs up a flirty drug dealer in a gym locker room for which the officer gets severely reprimanded. Clearly, it's no longer woke in Taiwan to bash gays in gym locker rooms especially if their dads are influential politicians.

Demoted, Min-Han winds up patrolling a mostly deserted street when he spots a red envelope on the sidewalk. Don't pick it up, Min-Han! Uh-oh, he doesn't listen. Instantly, he discovers he's now the fiancé of an equally cute, slightly flamboyant queer spirit named Mao Mao (Austin Lin), who was the victim of a hit-and-run driver. You see, in that red envelope, Mao Mao's grandmother had placed the nail clippings and locks of hair she had snipped off her beloved grandson's corpse. She had always promised him true love

Is this woman crazy? What about when she insists Min-Han was Mao Mao's pet dog in a previous life? This can't be true, right?

But after Min-Han returns home and while he showers, a visible version of Mao Mao appears to him and pleasurably smiles at the size of his new spouse’s crotch.

"Get away from me, gay guy!" Min-han screams.

Call me "hubby," Mao Mao insists.

"Hubby?" Min-Hasn questions. Why can't he be the hubby?

You see, in a same-sex relationship with a ghost, the spirit has the power to decide who’s the femme and who's the butch. The ghost, by the way, can also enter human bodies and make them do want they want them to do, even to saunter about like RuPaul.

Hey, Min-Han asks, isn't there a way to get a divorce from an unfeasible mate who likes to pop his head through walls? Well, yes, there is now that you ask. First find out who ran over Mao Mao and secondly find someone to love him eternally.

What follows are drug dealings, fisticuffs, grumpy gangsters, grandmas who insist you come over for dinner, and a few shoot-outs that lead to quite a sweet, moving, satisfying finale proving once and for all that sometimes we all a good dose of romantic silliness.

How about two or three doses.

You'll certain receive a dollop or two of the absurd from Amazon Prime's Red, White and Royal Blue directed and co-written by Matthew Lopez, a Best-Play-Tony-Award winner for the marvelous The Inheritance. That work spotlighted the tragedy of AIDS with the insights of E.M. Foster and gay men eating dinner and so on. RWARB is a bit more lowbrow with its intentions. This international hit that a few weeks ago was crowned the streamer’s third most-watched romantic comedy of all time is based on the hit novel that chronicles the affaire de coeur of the bisexual son (Taylor Zakhar Perez) of a female President of the United States and the closeted Prince of Great Britain (Nicholas Galitzine). Imagine the Hallmark Channel making soft-core porn and you have much of the offering. The acting varies in believability as does the script, but the two leads are beautiful, especially when dancing together among nude museum statuary, reminding me of how Melissa Marr described a character in her Wickedly Lovely: "He looked good, like sin in a suit."

But to be honest, tears were gushing forth from my orbs just before the end credits rolled. No one was more shocked than me. I didn't even weep during Sophie's Choice. Thankfully, I go nowhere without a Kleenex.

Mr. Galitzine, by the way, also has a supporting role as Jeff, a self-absorbed football jock suffering from satyriasis in director/co-writer Emma Siligman's Bottoms, a title which refers to societal positionings, not sexual ones. The nearly universally praised comedy is a rip-roaring, lesbianic takeover of the high-school, "I-want-to-lose-my-virginity" high-jinks genre.

Here Seligman reunites with the star of her directorial debut Shiva Baby, Rachel Sennott. Sennott serves double-duty here as co-writer while playing the loudmouthed, obnoxious PJ, who along with her highly insecure pal Josie (The Bear's Ayo Edebiri), moon over the in-girls of their senior class.

So how does one survive high school with raging hormones and a complete lack of savoir faire? Throw not getting expelled after possibly hitting the Jeff with your auto which might cause your classmates to lose a long-pined-for football championship won’t help your cause.

How about starting a female fight club with fraudulent premise that it's a feminist venture. The principal sort of falls for the pitch.

What follow are bruised females with some clever banter, a belle hooks joke plus a huge amount of dunderheadedness that these sort of comedies call for.

Can Bottoms become the huge hit Bros wanted to be and that the lesbian-themed,Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once was? Having beaten EEAAO's opening week take and with a continued solid box-office, Bottoms won't win any Oscars but the film just might prove to the powers that be that sapphic cinema is a money-making proposition.

(By the way, Bottoms received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Same-Sex-Comedy Approval from Helen Eisenbach, the author of Lesbianism Made Easy. That should be good for a few more hundred thousand admissions, no?)

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Mother Nature's Anus

Brandon Judell — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 15:42:44 +0000

Mother Nature's Anus Brandon Judell September 3, 2022 - 11:42

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The Dutch horror film The Human Centipede (2009) and the current season of The Boys on Amazon Prime have put the spotlight on that body part that most of us are more comfortable keeping hidden. Yes, the Anus has been gaining more and more screentime in recent years, and now it earns even more respect in Erica's First Holy Shit, a gleefully hallucinogenic mockumentary that has to be seen to be believed, and even then you just might not.

Here, Mother Nature's sphincter is utilized as the gateway to Satan's office where the Evil One (Andie Flores) fashions deals. For example, a former client, RuPaul, sold his soul for fame in this very rectum. "How else would a drag queen get an Emmy?" Beezlebub gloats.

The lead character here is one Erica Nix, who's portrayed by one Erica Nix, a seductive presence with Ann-Margret tresses and an oversized libido. This causes one to wonder whether the real-life version of Ms. Nix is a whole lot like her film persona, a compulsively masturbating lesbian who goes around in bathing suits that leave very little to the imagination. That's when she's even wearing swimwear.

This feature, by the way, was shot during the highly nerve-wracking beginnings of the Covid era (June 2020) in Austin, Texas, by three directors collectively known as THIS IS NOT A CULT (Jessica Garner, Sawyer Stoltz and Jeremy Von Stilb). Two of the three are also responsible for the spicy leftist screenplay. Consequently, many of the scenes were shot against a bluescreen.

Holy Shit begins with a Zoom group-therapy sex session that lasts for a rather frenetic seven minutes. In each of the screen's nine little cubicles, determined women are aiming to bring the "universal elemental force of pleasure" into their beings employing paddles, vibrators, and feathers among other artifacts. (I think I spotted an eggplant and a pickle also in use, but don't hold me to it.)

After this orgasmic opening, her online compatriots seem sated, but not Ms. Nix, who has an itch that demands more:

"Here I am with tons of people happy to see me running around in my Spandex thong, but at the end of the day, what do I have? What am I doing?"

Well, at this moment, she is loudly plopping out her tampon and placing it into a glass of water being held by one of her twin male slaves, or so they seem.

Frustrated, Erica decides to quit her shrink, whom she feels has been holding her back. Now the peverse Wizard of Oz adventure begins in her bathtub after she squirts on a facial mask with the ingredients that include vodka, psilocybin, and methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Wouldn't you like to be Erica's pores? No wonder she's tripping.

Well, before you say, "Lindsey Graham" twice, our ultra-feminist heroine is schmoozing with a ditsy Gwyneth Paltrow (Lynn MetCalf), Mother Nature (Christeene), God (Nikki DaVaughn), and Ms. Nix's teenage self (p1nkstar) who also seems to be suffering from chronic masturbatory needs. The real Richard Simmons pops in now and then, too. No wonder Erica decides to run for mayor of Austin, promising free abortions for all and more shade at bus stops. And no wonder the population of Austin comes out for wildly inane and almost Hello, Dolly!-esque finale.

Whether you’ll be charmed by this offering, as I admittedly I was at times, or whether Big Shit will cause you to switch your political affiliation to something more rightwing, depends a whole lot on whether you are a fan of early John Waters and Jack Smith films, have a crush on Annie Sprinkle, or have a supply of Alice B. Toklas brownies on hand.

Rating: Five Pepto Bismols

(Erica's Big Shit premiered to sold-out screenings at PRISM 35: GLIFF's 35th Annual LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Austin the end of August. It will now be flushing out at festivals across the country.)

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I Kissed a Lesbian Jehovah's Witness

Brandon Judell — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:21:45 +0000

I Kissed a Lesbian Jehovah's Witness Brandon Judell June 18, 2022 - 13:21

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You Can Live Forever

It's almost impossible to imagine that there was once a time when every other TV series or film didn't feature at least one lesbian character in a positive light. Some now are even superheroes (Maeve in The Boys) who just might save the world.

But features, especially those both written and directed by lesbians have been far and in between, and when these films arrived, they seldom received the attention and the outlets they deserved. Some early pioneers who bucked the system included Chantal Akerman (Je Tu Il Elle (1974)), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman (1996)), and Rose Troche (Go Fish (1994)). The latter inspired the highly illuminating 1998 essay by M. Dolores Herrero Granado with a title that tells all: "Go Fish: Resisting Silence and Invisibility and Coming Out as a Lesbian in a Post-Affirmation Era."

Well, now add Sarah Watts to this once sparcely membered grouping. Watts, a self-proclaimed Canadian lesbian who grew up in a Jehovah's Witness community, has noted: "As a teenager, I was eager to see a story with a character who even remotely resembled me on the movie screen, but I was always disappointed. When there were lesbian characters, they were inevitably used as plot points and usually died tragic deaths." Then she read about the Wachowskis' sultry Bound in a newspaper. Knowing she just had to view this film or else, she took the money she was saving for a European venture and flew instead to Vancouver to catch Bound (1996) on the big screen. If you've already seen this Jennifer-Tilly/Gina-Gershon starrer, you know it was worth twice that cost.

Now decades later Watts and her co-director/co-writer Mark Slutsky, both inspired by Watts' early life, have fashioned a resoundingly touching film, You Can Live Forever, that falls into that regular Romeo/Juliet coming-out mode that most LGBTQI coming-out stories adopt. Or maybe most love stories.

Two teen high schoolers meet, they fall into instant adoration, but society wants to pull them apart. Can two young women, who like kissing and fondling each other, fight the odds or will their love end like a dreaded Shakespearian tragedy. You pretty much know the answer even though the screenplay will keep you guessing.

The film begins in a train bathroom. Jamie Butley (a superb Anwen O'Driscoll) is standing on a lidless toilet, puffing on a blunt, and blowing the smoke into a ceiling vent. She's wearing a Siouxie and the Banshees T-shirt, wire-framed glasses, and jeans. Imagine a newbie lesbian. Well, the blunt is put away, and the train eventually stops at Gare Saguenay. Welcome to her new temporary home.

You see Dad just died, Mom has had a nervous breakdown of sorts, and Jamie’s been farmed out to her aunt who's a dyed-in-the-wool Jehovah's Witness.

Before we go on, here's some basic facts for those whose door has never been knocked upon by a Jehovah's Witness. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 76% of this religion's practitioners feel homosexuality should be discouraged, while only 16% state queer folk should be accepted. Imagine their views twenty years ago.

But not only is the same-sex act condemned, same-sex thought is demonized. As Janja Lalich and Karla McLaren note quite thoroughly in their 2010 article for the Journal of Homosexuality: "Jehovah's Witnesses condemns homosexual acts, thoughts, and feelings. Consequently, gay and lesbian Witnesses experience not just stigmatization and conflict between their sexual and religious identities in the social world, but also a nearly impossible task in their inner world."

Back to Jamie's new environs. Her aunt makes spaghetti, prayers are said over the table, then Jamie is forced to put on the plainest, most ill-fitting of dresses and attend an evening prayer gathering. Oh, no! How much tedium can a teen handle?

But then, while standing with the other attendees for some hymn singing, Jamie spots a back of an intriguing head of hair in the front row. That head of hair suddenly turns around and smiles. Meet the charming Marike (June Laporte).

Marike saddles up to Jamie after the service and invites her to a family dinner, which leads to sleepovers, and the "accidental" hand on breast while asleep. The two are soon inseparable, but can a believer and a nonbeliever ever get on the same footing?

When you watch the pair ogling each other over a dinner table with the innocent gooiness of first love, you have to say yes. Jamie and Marike have multiple "Tony/Maria-in-the-dancehall" moments where the girls block everyone else from their senses. You almost feel as if you are intruding and to be polite, you almost want to excuse yourself from the theater.

Here's a celebration of love trying to blossom in a world of enforced dullness. No video games. No birthday celebrations. And your mother is deemed dead and not to be spoken of if she leaves the community. Worst of all, families sit together and make believe they enjoy eating bowls of brightly green, lime Jell-o cubes.

So what's the timely film about? A love that must high jump over numerous religious blockades. With the beauty, warmth, and sort of naive intelligence of its two heroines, both finely embodied by LaPorte and O'Driscoll with the aid of a strong supporting cast, You Can Live Forever easily joins the ranks of the must-see LGBTQI films of the year.

(Hint #1 to ending: Just as Jamie enters her English class for the first time, her teacher is in the middle of the following line from Sonnet 116: "Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks . . . ."

Hint #2: The Cocteau Twins are letting loose with "Pitch the Baby" on Jamie's cassette player: "I'm so happy to care for you / I only want to love you.")

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When A Planet of Lesbians Is Not Exactly Heaven

Brandon Judell — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 15:08:43 +0000

When A Planet of Lesbians Is Not Exactly Heaven Brandon Judell June 8, 2022 - 11:08

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Imagine Hieronymus Bosch as a lesbian filmmaker on acid, and you've almost visualized After Blue (Dirty Paradise). Yes, it's sort of The Garden of Earthly Delights redux. However, while the feature's French director Bertrand Mandico might heartily agree, his main intention is to realize his celluloid philosophy in a spectacularly visual sci-fi/surrealist-western venture sprinkled throughout with frontal female nudity plus ejaculating tree branches. You see, he's co-creator of "The Incoherence Manifesto," a philosophical treatise on how to make a movie.

To be "incoherent," according to Mandico, "means to have faith in cinema. It means to have a romantic approach, unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration. Incoherence that's an absence of cynicism but not irony." In other words, just go with the flow. If you don't comprehend exactly what’s occurring on-screen, you'll still be having a hoot asking yourself, "Does that blind android really have tentacles for a penis that can strangle you?" "Do Poles really piss in their boots to keep warm?" "Why are all the pistols named after clothing designers?" So don't drop your pearls when someone indeed threatens, "I'll shoot you with my Gucci."

None of the above will be surprising to those who’ve viewed the director's The Wild Boys (2019). In that award-winner, a group of well-to-do lads, all portrayed convincingly by young women, are punished for defiling their female instructor after acting out Macbeth. Sent off by their parents for sadistic treatment aboard a ship whose captain has tattooed privates, the teens are marooned on an island where they diet mainly on a vagina-like fruit that causes groin transformations. When one character's genitals fall off, he is asked, "What will you do with your dick?" He responds stoically, "What should I do with it? Bury it with dignity."

Dignity is hard to find, even on a picturesque planet called After Blue. Here the new inhabitants are women who've left Earth because it was "sick, rotten." Wouldn't you have joined them? Seemingly, all the males have died off because their hair started growing inwardly. The gals, on the other hand, got hairy necks that constantly have to be shaved.

The plan was to create a Utopia with new mandates to avoid the left-behind errors, including "no machines, no electronics, no screens, no chemistry." They also set up micro-communities based on nationality. Not a good idea if you are seeking eternal peace.

Well, one day, a young bleached-blonde, Roxy (Paula-Luna Retenfelder), along with three of her annoying friends are frolicking along a beach. Mid-romp, they came across the head of a Polish woman who’s apparently buried up to the neck in sand. Only Roxy considers digging her out. She does so, and it turns out to be Kate Bush (Agata Buzek) who has one hairy arm and an extra eyeball on her crotch. (You can't help but conclude this film is one long, crazed paean to the similarly named British songstress.) Once unearthed, Ms. Bush immediately guns down the self-involved partiers and then grants Roxy three desires after making out with her and forcing the girl to kneel. Eye-to-eye contact has seldom been so bizarre.

Jump cut: After Bush departs, Roxy informs her community that's dressed up as witches of the slaughter. The town's revengeful leader insists Zora (Elina Löwensohn), Roxy's hairdresser-mother who's the local neck-shaver, immediately go kill the murderess and bring back her corpse: "Take your lovely daughter and a warm coat so you don't die. You’ll wait for Kate Bush to come dance the polka."

The rest of After Blue is a chronicle of that quest, and quite a resplendent trek it is. Toma Baqueni's elaborately detailed dreamlike sets, Pauline Jacquard's highly textured and easy-to-shed costumes, Pierre Desprats's addictive musical notes, plus the rest of tech folks meld their warped imaginations into a highly creative vision that would have had the Brothers Grimm applauding in their lederhosen.

The dialogue is also highly quotable:

"She could cut her own horse's throat while listening to disco."

"Painting exists only if the eyes can embrace it."

There's even a memorable marriage proposal after a rather grotesque femme knows Zora for a whole minute.

Grotesque Femme: I'm looking for a wife because my wife is dead. I'm not that young, but we could get along, you and I.

Zora: No thanks.

Clearly, those embracing Downton Abbey: A New Era and its inept treatment of queer wooing should probably skip After Blue. It's not for all tastes. But if you idolize the early films of David Lynch and Alejandro (El Topo) Jodorowsky, if you desire a 94% testosterone-free movie experience, and if you dream now and then of owning a complete set of Crayola crayons, look no further.

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Whiny (Yet Nice) Gay Kvetchers on Parade

Brandon Judell — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:53:12 +0000

Whiny (Yet Nice) Gay Kvetchers on Parade Brandon Judell March 24, 2022 - 20:53

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Few gay characters on stage or on film have been as self-centered as Michael (Kenneth Nelson) in Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (TBITB). "Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse," he whines. Besides being a racist, cash-strapped, guilt-ridden Catholic who does poor imitations of Judy Garland, Michael also casually throws expensive vicuña sweaters on the floor. You no doubt want to slap him on first witnessing his antics on the big screen . . . or at least throw a Croc at your Samsung when Jim Parson portrays him for Netflix.

But recently there have been several competitors for The Grumble Queen Crown, all ready to sing "I've Gotta Be Me" at the expense of everyone else's well-being.

There was last year's Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, an oft-fun, intermittently moving adaptation of the West End musical, which itself is a takeoff on a documentary about 16-year-old Jamie Campbell, a British high-school lad who ignored churlish taunts from his peers and a cold-shouldering by his dad, to become a highly spangled drag queen with Wizard of Oz pumps. Being a teen with raging hormones, Jamie’s irritating self-centeredness is understandable but not always forgivable. At one point, he viciously turns his back on his supportive mom and is catty to an aging drag-queen shop owner (a brilliant Richard E. Grant) who survived the AIDS era. To add glitter to his disdain, Jamie then insists the shaping of his eyebrows is of more importance than his best-gal-pal passing her exams to enter medical school. He even turns his one caring teacher into a villain for daring to suggest he have a fallback career that doesn’t demand mascara dexterity. All ends, though, happily with exuberant song, dance, and a hug from the local drag-phobic bully.

Welcome Three Months starring Troye Sivan, the multitalented singer/songwriter/dancer/actor who's done for the modern queer teen what Nespresso has done for coffee pods. You press a button and you're in bliss.

Three Months' director/writer Jared Frieder, inspired by his own broken-condom experience, has fashioned a tale of South-Floridian high-schooler Caleb (Sivan) who, after a one-night stand, learns his partner has tested positive for HIV. Now the self-involved lad, who lives with his grandmother (the great Ellen Burstyn in a white fright wig), learns he'll have to wait ninety days to see if he himself has been infected. Like Jamie, Caleb is fatherless. In this case, Pop's dead, which makes one ponder whether it's better to have a dead dad or a homophobic one. Anyway, Caleb has a best-gal-pal of the lesbian persuasion, whom he starts ignoring when he falls for a fellow teen who hadn't heard of David Bowie and might also have AIDS. To top it off, our hero is basically motherless since his mom rejected him after wedding an Orthodox rabbi. Isn't life a trial? Everything will work out in the end, of course, won't it?

Heartfelt and brimming forth with a valuable spotlighting of issues that the young LGBTIQI+ crowd must confront, Three Months is a must-see for the under-20 crowd while still being pleasant enough for the aged. Best line: "Fuck you for making me like Taylor Swift." For a little more depth, I would have recommended: "Fuck you for making me like Jonathan Swift."

Which leads us to Nicholas Maury, with whom you'll be familiar if you're a fan of the Netflix hit series Call My Agent (CMA). Within that comedy, based in a French talent agency, Maury plays Hervé, a flighty, purse-lipped, affectionate yet astute assistant to an assistant to the stars. Hungering for love and esteem, he recalls TBITB's Emory who was disparagingly described as "a butterfly in heat." Through the highly bingeable four seasons of CMA, his Hervé is a comic delight, but as a part of a tightly knit ensemble.

But now Maury has decided to become the writer, director, and star of his very own venture, My Best Part, a tale of a highly self-centered, malfunctioning homosexual actor who, due to his uncontrollable suspicions about his lover, a hunky veterinarian, destroys the relationship. Basically, Maury's just renaming his Hervé character "Jérémie Meyer" and transferring him into a new setting. Placed front and center for 108 minutes, a whiny leading man, who's approaching 40 and behaving 12, can be a bit exasperating.

The film begins in triumphant neurosis with Jérémie seeking succor at a Jealousy Anonymous group meeting. Shortly after seating himself, a woman named Jeanne admits she hasn't been seen the green-eyed monster for a whole eleven days. The other attendees applaud her. She continues: "When I started off, jealousy was like a sore or eczema that goes red when I scratch it, and it itches even more because I scratch it." More Applause. A bewildered Jérémie is then called upon, and he uneasily shares that his father, divorced from his mother and remarried to a much younger woman, had recently committed suicide with a sawed-off shotgun. No applause. When asked why he was attending this gathering specifically, he runs out into the street.

As Lope de Vega noted, "There is no greater glory than love, nor any greater punishment than jealousy." He should have added "self-inflicted" punishment.

After having avoided much-needed introspection, later that day, Jérémie loses a movie role he thought he definitely had. That the character played tennis, and he didn't, escaped him. Come nightfall, Jérémie starts stalking his boyfriend Albert (Arnaud Valois). But when Jérémie breaks into the vet's operating room, Albert's not penetrating another gent, but a ferret. He's midst of extracting its uterus. (Alert: There is a very cute vet by his Albert's side.)

Finally, with his love life and career going nowhere, with only an audition for the suicidal Moritz in Wedekind's Spring Awakening on the horizon, Jérémie returns to the country home of his mother (the grand Nathalie Baye) for his father's memorial service. Here he becomes even more depressed and childlike, but there is hope. Even better, there's a beautiful young man (Theo Christine) who swims nude at night in the swimming pool outside Jérémie's bedroom window.

What I sort of left out so far is how good most of My Best Part is, displaying great promise for Maury's future directorial career. The film is helmed, written, and cast with great skill and often wit. As noted, all of the males, even in bit roles, are centerfold ready. (The gay gaze?) If only Maury had left 25 or so minutes of his own performance on the cutting room floor, especially the musical finale which had me screaming, "Get the fuck off the screen already!" this would have been a four-star effort.

Dylan Thomas noted: I find it so easy to get lost in my actions and my words.

(My Best Part is available on VOD nationwide from Altered Innocence, while Three Months is on Paramount+ and Everybody's Talking About Jamie is yours for the asking on Amazon Prime Video.)

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A Tale of Escape, Coming Out, and Finding Love in Copenhagen

Brandon Judell — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 18:03:21 +0000

A Tale of Escape, Coming Out, and Finding Love in Copenhagen Brandon Judell February 8, 2022 - 13:03

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"I wasn't afraid of wearing my sister's dresses," notes the adult Amin (a pseudonym, still image above), recalling his early childhood in Kabul in the late 1980s. He also reveals he'd had a big crush on Jean-Claude van Damme, whose poster hung over his bed and sometimes winked at the boy.

"In Afghanistan, homosexuals didn't exist. There wasn't even a word for them. They brought shame to a family," he also notes.

These memories occur near the beginning of Danish director Jonas Poher Rasmussen's extraordinary Flee, an animated tale of a young man's harrowing escape with what remained of his family from Afghanistan to Russia and finally, accidentally, by himself as a teen, to Copenhagen.

In this city new to him, Amin, without friends and relatives, wound up going to high school with Rasmussen, who became his pal. Decades later this project evolved. Amin, after much persuasion, allowed himself to be interviewed over many sessions, telling his true story in complete detail to another soul for the very first time.

His secrecy, a life kept hidden from even his current lover, was born out of fear. The one person he had slightly opened up to previously, a former boyfriend, threatened to turn Amin over to the authorities after a fight. Our hero, and Amin is definitely one, finally agreed to this venture only if his identity remained obscured. This is why Rasmussen employed various styles of animation intermixed with actual news footage to tell this tale.

The result is one the more engaging film experiences of this past year. Besides its queerdom and its ability to move you to well-earned tears, Flee is not without its moments of humor. Moreover, the result is that this Danish export has made Oscar history by being nominated for Best Animation, Best Documentary, and Best International Feature. That's no shock if you check the film's award category on IMDB.com where it's already won or been nominated for more than 100 such honors, from Melbourne to Jerusalem to Sundance.

The following is from a ten-minute Zoom chat I had recently with the tastefully bearded director.

Brandon Judell: So I've been looking at your other films or at least the trailers of your other films. Before we address Flee, your What He Did (2015) is a documentary about a gay man who killed his lover of 13 years, a famous Danish author and outspoken gay activist. Since I can't google anything about you, your personal autobiography being apparently nonexistent, are you married or can the gay community embrace you?

Jonas Poher Rasmussen: I am married. I have a wife and I have two daughters, yeah.

You're the third director with a wife and two children whom I've interviewed this year who's made a gay-themed film. A new trend possibly. That aside, why did Flee's Amin feel so able to open up to you about his homosexuality, or in Denmark is that not a problem?

In parts of Denmark, being gay is a problem. And in parts it's not. It's a little bit like here in the States. But you know I've known Amin since we were fifteen. He came out to me when he was sixteen, so his sexuality has always been a natural part of him for me. I guess it's never been a big deal.

Consequently, I really wanted it to feel the same in the film, that it should be natural that he was gay. But in the process of making the film, I realized that in all of his childhood in Afghanistan, being gay was something he couldn't be open about. I saw that that kind of mirrored in the story of him coming to Denmark and not being able to be honest about his past. [Amin lied to the authorities that his whole family had been murdered in Afghanistan to gain immigrant status in Denmark.] So there's always been a part of him that he’s had to hide. That’s why the film is called Flee; it's about a guy who's had to flee all his life.

Have many gay folk or escapees from Afghanistan come to you and said, "God, you really moved me." I was near tears the first time I was watching Flee.

Yes, I've had quite a few, both from a [Middle Eastern] background and from gay people coming to me and saying they really were moved seeing Flee. Especially by refugees who told me that that this is not just Amin's story, it's also their story. And I had a young queer man in Mexico coming to me saying that being queer in Mexico isn't easy, and he just felt safe for one-hour-and-a half hours with Amin, which was really beautiful. So it's been very rewarding to meet the audience around the world.

Considering your past and present work, you seem to have concentrated on underdogs and/or people who have lots of problems. How are you expressing yourself with these stories. It must be something that clicks within you.

Yeah, I think I have a soft spot for marginalized people and trying to figure out how people cope with being in a difficult situation. I'm really trying to humanize these people for others. That's what I’m trying to do here, and I've done it hopefully.

When you accept the Oscar for best documentary, do you think Amin will come out then? Would he accompany you or do you think he's always going to be secretive?

Well, if we're going to be in the race, he will still be anonymous I'm quite sure. With all the successful the film has gained these last months, I think he's more and more assured that he made the right choice of being anonymous because you know he doesn't want to be victimized. He told me that in the very beginning of doing this, I don't want to feel like victim. He really doesn't want look upon himself like that.