Arts & Entertainment

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Film Review: “Coming Out”

Unless you are gay or fit in somewhere along the queer spectrum you will never ever really be able to appreciate the traumas of coming out of the closet about your sexuality in this heteronormative world.    There is simply no one way of doing this, and when young filmmaker Alden Peters decided it was time he took this step starting with his family and friends, he looked for a film that could help guide him through the process, but all he could find were fictional accounts. He found that each of the stories were told in hindsight, and none […]

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Book Review: ‘Jazz Moon’ by Joe Okonkwo

In his debut novel, Joe Okonkwo composes a melodic tale that is as arousing and jarring as one might imagine the roaring jazz era of 1920’s Harlem. Jazz Moon, (Kensington Books), affords the reader a seat in any smoky speakeasy of that period, high on gin and jazz, enticed by the discord of the south and change; enraptured by the crescendo of New York City, art and love; compelled by the resonance of Paris and race. Jazz Moon, in part, is a love story. The beautiful complicated love story of main character Ben Charles, a burgeoning poet from the south who […]

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Book Review: ‘Radiance’ by Emanuel Xavier

Today, one can walk down to the Christopher Street pier, look out at that water shimmering, and find the walkways populous with so many ghosts—teenage hustlers, homeless youth, drag queens, defiant survivors no longer in the fight—who now only exist for many of us, moving like afterimages through these baby strollers, these bikes, the bodies of leisurely joggers—because Emanuel Xavier, song by song, through his several collections, so devotedly conjures them for us: “Us who created / something from nothing to make it appealing / for those who own everything” (“Gentrification”). Or rather, with his new collection Radiance, he invokes […]

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Film Review: I’m A Porn Star : Gay4Pay

Don’t expect to discover anything startling new or even shocking in any way from filmmaker Charlie David’s gentle probe (!) into  why so many of the performers in the world of gay pornography self identify as ‘straight”.  As the acceptability of the sexuality spectrum continues to evolve in a very positive way, it does at least make it easier for more men to openly discuss where they fit into the Kinsey Scale, especially when it involves money changing hands. David starts by establishing his credentials from when he was the only openly gay actor in Here TV’s gay soft-porn series […]

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Book Review: ‘Black Wave’ by Michelle Tea

What if the world had ended in 1999? How would the story of your life have changed? In Michelle Tea’s newest book, Black Wave, this is the case: as 1999 progresses, the state of the declining world moves rapidly toward decimation. The narrator, Michelle—a hard-partying, drink and drug-loving, San Franciscan lesbian writer—decides it’s time to get out of dodge, and announces her plan to move to Los Angeles. Her friends don’t believe her, but Michelle lives up to her promise—after a few more binges and a few more kisses— convincing a lover to rent a U-haul and drive her south. […]

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Book Review: ‘Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles’ Edited by Michael Reynolds

A man has a look on his face that screams trouble. He wants something from you. He wants you to take your clothes off. He wants you naked. His clothes barely fit. They’re skin-tight and his thickly drawn muscles burst out of every opening. Even the shading is sexy. The man wears leather and, with hands much larger than his face, reaches over to touch you. It’s not like he wants to buy you a drink, he wants to be the drink. Outside the window, more men. Further away, more still. The streets are brimming with them, and beyond are […]

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Book Review: Blacklight: Porto’s ‘Sergio Y’ Renders a Compassionate but Incomplete Exploration of Gender Identity

Alexandre Vidal Porto’s Sergio Y (translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd) isn’t a crime story in the strict sense of the genre, even though it does contain a crime. Winner of the Paraná Literary Prize, it’s a mystery in as much as detection and revelation of character drive is its narrative. Beautifully told and translated, it explores the limitations of truly knowing another person, but not without some problematic limitations of its own. Armando, an aging and well respected therapist, in São Paulo, takes on a patient, Sergio Y., the sixteen-year-old child of a wealthy Brazilian family who, despite […]

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Book Review: ‘Boy Erased’ by Garrard Conley

It was difficult to not become angry when reading Boy Erased, Garrard Conley’s memoir of growing up in a devout Southern Baptist household in a small Arkansas town and his brief-but-damaging contact with Love in Action, at the time, the largest ex-gay therapy organization in the world. It’s difficult because this book isn’t vindictive, and, oh, how I wanted it to be. No one gets what’s coming to them. There’s no palpable anger. There’s no penance or resolution. There’s just the uneasy co-existence between a cultural geography Conley has been conditioned to accept that doesn’t—and won’t—accept him back. But that […]

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Book Review: ‘Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology’ Edited by Sfé R. Monster

It’s an odd phenomenon that, somehow, the queer character seems to always be left out of the adventure narrative. Be it sci-fi, fantasy, or even a dystopian narrative, you’ll find that LGBT protagonists are nowhere to be found. Each of these genres are typically riddled heteros played by nondescript white romantic leads in their movie adaptations–a Chris Pine or Rachel McAdams. What Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi & Fantasy Comic Anthology aims to accomplish, and succeeds at, is representation in an underrepresented area. This beautiful collection of comics, edited by Sfé R. Monster, gathers a huge diversity of styles and narratives. […]

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Film Review: “People You May Know”

The title of this new (mostly) American dramedy from Spanish filmmaker J.C. Falcón is taken from FaceBook which frequently proffers up suggestions of new friends.  In this instance it serves as means to tell Joe (Sean Mather) the protagonist, that he has been ‘catfished’ : the delightful term for someone who has been lured into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona.  More of that later. Joe and his three best friends are now in their late 30’s and are reaching a point in their lives when they each will be confronted with some major unexpected developments which will require change […]

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