ABC is reassembling the team of the 2008 movie Milk for another project about the gay rights movement, eight-hour miniseries When We Rise. Milk director Gus Van Sant has joined the mini, written/executive produced by Milk writer Dustin Lance Black and executive produced by the film’s producer Bruce Cohen. The project, which had been(…)
When Marlon James won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction in October, it came as a surprise to many — including the 44-year-old, out gay Jamaican author. James won for “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a long, violent, sexually explicit, and altogether brilliant novel that takes off from the 1976 attempted assassination of reggae(…)
Sculptor Barb Davis has a vision. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she plans to bring together a group of authors to write essays which Barb will use as inspiration to create an art piece to convey a cohesive artistic expression. When the women Barb has chosen gather for the project’s(…)
The title of James Sie’s novel Still Life Las Vegas evokes a perplexing contradiction. The city of Las Vegas, with its raucous slot machines and flashy performers, seems like a poor place to suggest a still life painting. The most interesting part of James Sie’s novel, however, describes the nascent relationship between Walter, an artistically(…)
Chemsex is an unidentifiable issue to most people but after watching this excellent but scarily sobering new documentary from filmmakers Max Gogarty and William Fairman of VICE you will see how this fast-growing phenomenon is deeply affecting a certain part of the urban gay community. It’s about gay men ‘slamming’, which is evidently the(…)
On the surface, Signs Point to Yes (Swoon Reads) is seemingly a fluffy, feel-good romance. The book shifts third person perspectives between that of Jane, her sister Margo, and Jane’s crush Teo. You might never know it from the flowery genre-typical cover, but inside this book is more diversity than you’re likely to find in your(…)
Dodie Bellamy’s collection of essays, When the Sick Rule the World, immediately hooks the reader with a disarmingly funny and libidinous reading of a scene from a classic animated film. The effect is one of being grabbed by the wrist and dragged, willingly, into a series of dark and deeply felt vignettes that address with(…)
Wayne Koestenbaum’s latest, The Pink Trance Notebooks, is a difficult book to review—but in a very good way. In fact, it would be difficult, in the space of a traditional review, to do justice to a single of its poems, or “trance notebooks,” each its own luxuriant collection or collage of pithy observations, speculations, reports,(…)
The true story of the young woman who ruled Sweden as its Queen for a mere 10 years in the middle of the 17th Century has been told several times already, most notable in the 1933 movie Queen Christina starring Greta Garbo. Whilst this early version also touched on how fiercely independent the young ruler was,(…)
Every cell of my body. Naked and tough, something new and beautiful, adorned. Learning these streets and how to walk down them. Learning how to find red silk in a bargain bin, to tighten straps, to walk. To meet the eyes. To swish my ass, to insist in the pleasure of thighs brushing together, glaring,(…)