Band of Thebes

Born May 21: Liz Feldman, Raymond Burr

Comic Liz Feldman has shared in four daytime Emmy wins for Ellen's talk show but many lesbians love her best for her own no-budget web broadcasts from her kitchen table, This Just Out. The delightful amateurism has entinced big indie stars like Tegan and the ladies of the L Word to be interviewed with goofy, earnest questions. No surprise, her manner is several parts Ellen, along with some Michael Cera, a little Rachel Maddow, and a snatch of Sarah Silverman. The internets hasn't seen much of Liz lately because after a stint with Leno, she's gone from success to success: writer-producer on Hot in Cleveland and writer-supervising producer on 2 Broke Girls. Last year she proposed to singer-songwriter Rachael Cantu, who accepted. 

It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the fatal plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." However, one short-lived marriage can be documented.

Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years. Read Michael Starr's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr.

Born May 15: Barbara Hammer

Just since 2009 when she turned 70, pioneering queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer has had a retrospective of her work at MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris; her short called "A Horse Is Not a Metaphor" won a Teddy at the Berlinale; her brilliant and inspiring book Hammer!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life [Kindle] won a Publishing Triangle Award, won a Lammy, and was a favorite on Thebes' queer lit poll; and this year she won a Guggenheim. All deserved, and all infinitely more gratifying when you remember she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006. Her decades of creating dozens of experimental work to record queer lives (Dyketactics, A Gay Day, Superdyke Meets Madam X, etc.) reached a new high in 1992 with her first feature documentary Nitrate Kisses, acclaimed at Sundance, festivals worldwide, and at the Whitney Biennial. She says, “I choose film and video to make the invisible visible. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate queer and other people whose stories have not been told. I make a multi-level cinema that engages audiences viscerally and emboldens them intellectually. My current work has turned towards recovering missing histories of lesbian artists and is inspired by the words of Gayatri Spivak who cautions against an uncritical archivism leading to nostalgia.” The MoMA curator wrote:

... she came out as a lesbian, an act that helped radicalize her approach to directing. Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, she soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer has since directed more than eighty films, using avant-garde strategies to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other heretofore unrepresented voices. In the 1970s her films dealt with the representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history.

Barbara was born in Hollywood, graduated from UCLA, and earned two masters degrees at SFSU. She has lived in New York City for many years and still teaches each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Born May 13: Armistead Maupin, Bruce Chatwin, Rupert Smith, Alan Ball

Growing up in a prominent conservative Southern family in North Carolina, Armistead Maupin always knew he was gay yet his natural reserve kept him from acting on those feelings until after college, after serving in the Navy, when he was twenty-six. He came out the year he turned thirty. Good thing, because 1974 is also when he began publishing his panoramic observations about San Francisco and its pansexual inhabitants in the Marin paper, The Pacific Sun. In hindsight the next steps look obvious -- move the column to the Chronicle in 1976, morph them into a novel called Tales of the City in 1978, repeat, repeat, and achieve literary renown as the creator of one of the most cherished character driven book series of the century. The film adaptations in the early 90s starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis were widely praised and greatly loved, and, inevitably, vociferously attacked by conservatives, especially because the first film was shown on PBS. Several state legislatures in the South officially condemned the series. No surprise, the frightened suits at PBS ignored the record breaking ratings and awards, instead opting to cancel the sequel. Enter Showtime, which produced the next two adaptations and earned a total of six additional Emmy nominations. Maupin's bravery in print was matched in action, fighting aids and for gay rights. Author of three other novels (Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, Michael Tolliver Lives), he has written the screenplays for four adaptations of his work and wrote the excellent narration for The Celluloid Closet. After a twelve-year relationship with Terry Anderson, Maupin met and is now married to Christopher Turner. Last year they left their beloved San Francisco and moved to Santa Fe, where he is working on a new novel. (photo by sfleo67)

A contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to accept that he was gay, he married a woman, Elizabeth Chanler, in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and exclusively pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She didn't mind, although she did ask for a separation in 1980.)

Chatwin's reflex for making up cover stories appears to have extended into his nonfiction. The local people of his marvelous travel books like In Patagoniaand The Songlines disputed the accuracy of some of his writing, claiming he embellished or created characters and conversations described as fact. Many episodes in those essays only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets. Although there's nothing outright gay in his much loved first novel On the Black Hill, it concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Even when he was dying at forty-eight in 1989, he remained so closeted he said he had a rare, fatal blood disease contracted in China from a bat bite, rather than say he had aids. One of his lovers was Jasper Conran; Chatwin died in the South of France in a house owned by Jasper's mother, Shirley Conran, and his ashes were scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese.

Rupert Smith's output is so big and versatile he needs three names to cover it. His own literary fiction includes most recently the award-winning Man's World which follows two storylines of gay Londoners decades apart, both revolving around a trio of similar types made memorable by individual quirks: a quieter man whose best friend is screamingly camp and whose off-again-on-again lover is a hot bloke with serious self-acceptance issues. As in The Swimming-Pool Library, the historical characters (and the old men they become) are more interesting than the funnier but shallower contemporary club denizens. Rupert James is his name for swift, swirly commercial Jackie Collins-ish fiction like Silk and Step Sisters. And James Lear delivers gay erotica in clever settings with actual wit: a country house whodunit (The Back Passage), a murder on a long journey aboard the legendary train The Flying Scotsman (The Secret Tunnel), a Civil War romance between a spoiled white heir and a runaway slave (Hot Valley), and a Robert Louis Stevenson-style romp through Scotland in the 1750s (The Low Road). A brand new James Lear book comes at you next month. Generously, Rupert has posted on his site a list of his 101 favorite novels with a wonderfully opinionated paragraph about each. At #17 is Arnold Bennett's 1908 classic The Old Wives' Tale.

Could a plastic bag caught in the wind on a lower Manhattan street change your life? Alan Ball watched one float for ten minutes and made it a hallmark of his first movie script, American Beauty, which won five Oscars including best picture, best director, best actor, and his own best screenplay. He parlayed that success into writing and directing his gay-positive mortuary series Six Feet Under, for which he earned an Emmy, a DGA, and a PGA. It lasted five seasons and won a total of 46 awards. Ball returned to feature films in 2007 with Towelhead, and continued his partnership with HBO with the supremely sexy, bloody, metaphorical, vampires as minorities ("God Hates Fangs"), Emmy-winning True Blood that launches its sixth season next month. Ball and his partner live next door to another Oscar winning writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, who sued Alan in March 2011 over the "obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams" of their exotic bird aviary. 

Bruce LaBruce's Essay on the Decline, Cooptation of Camp

With the rush to convince straight politicians and judges we're the same as them and worthy of the same institutions and rights, anyone might believe gay people had stopped thinking about the value of difference. Queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce adapts his lecture from last year's Camp/Anti-Camp conference in Berlin for an essay in the new issue of Nat. Brut journal. Rictor Norton says it's "the best analysis of camp since Sontag."

LaBruce begins with fifteen lists of subcategories such as bad gay camp (Will & Grace, Adam Lambert), good straight camp (September, 3 Women), bad straight camp (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Stanley Tucci in Prada, Hunger Games), ultra camp (Wilde), bad ultra camp (Liza in Sex & the City 2), reactionary camp (Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy), subversive camp (Pee Wee Herman), quasi-camp (Midnight Cowboy, Cruising), intentional camp (The Shining, Casino Royale), and unintentional camp (J. Edgar, The Iron Lady), among others.

Realizing, "sadly, most of it falls under the category of 'bad straight camp,'" he traces how we got here and blames the new irony:

"...The net result was that much of the general populous (now roughly equivalent to 'pop culture') had adopted the posture as a given to the extent that people generally lost track of its meaning or purpose: there was a kind of ironic detachment from everything. People started routinely to say the opposite of what they meant, and meant it, failing to understand that their new 'sensibility' had become a betrayal of their actual former set of beliefs or tastes, which they even perhaps once held sacred. So in a sense, irony became a malaise, a kind of generalized disaffection that infected the dominant culture. I surmise that this is what opened up the floodgates for the rise of camp culture, or rather the corruption and misinterpretation of camp culture – a certain detached artificiality and forced excess..."

After a stinging critique of Britney, Gaga, Rihanna, Beyonce, and Nikki ("...hyper-referentiality, extreme hyperbole, a crudely obvious, unnuanced female sexuality, and even a vaguely pornographic sensibility which, unhappily, is post-feminist to the point of misogyny...") he laments:

"This new annexation and corruption of the camp sensibility now exists largely without the qualities of sophistication and secret signification that were developed out of necessity by the underground or outsider gay world, which originally created camp as a kind of gay signifying practice... It was developed as a secret language in order to identify oneself to like-minded or similarly closeted homosexuals, a shorthand of arcane and coded, almost kabbalistic references and practices developed in order to operate safely apart and without fear of detection from a conservative and conventional world that could be aggressively hostile towards homosexuals, particularly effeminate males and masculine females. In the contemporary world, in which gays have largely assimilated into the dominant order, such signifying practices have become somewhat obsolete, and the previous forms of camping and camp identification have long since been emptied of camp or gay significance, rendering them easily co-opted, commercialized, and trivialized."

Beyond the arts, his takedown of political camp is fierce:

"...For what are Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain other than conservative camp icons enacting a kind of reactionary burlesque on the American political stage? Wholly without substance, their views exaggerated and extremely stylized, and evincing a carefully contrived posture of 'compassionate conservatism,' they function merely as a crude spectacle that mocks the unwashed masses by pretending to be one of them while simultaneously offering them policies that are directly antithetical to their authentic needs."

Building to a high point he concludes, 

"The new tendency of conservative camp runs in diametrical opposition to the impulses of classic gay camp, which sought to celebrate, elevate, and even worship the qualities of deviance, difference, and eccentricity that characterized the highly aestheticized homosexual experience of past eras."

Read the full essay and support online journals like Nat. Brut.

Born April 22: John Waters

The oddball joy of his movies extends to real life: Last May, at 66, John Waters hitchhiked alone from Baltimore to San Francisco. Fifteen rides with total strangers took him eight days, and he says of his drivers, “Pot smokers, cops, I got everybody. And everybody was lovely.” An exercise in giving up control from his over-scheduled life, the trip will be the heart of his next book, tentatively titled Carsick. He explains, "The first half is a little novella. I imagine the 15 best rides that could ever happen, and I did the 15 worst rides that could ever happen."

His trashy yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, but beyond the films John Waters has written four books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he's made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester and Hairspray starring the incomparable Divine [also pictured] who was his special ally since their shared childhood in Maryland. Johnny Depp fans might insist on including 1990's Cry Baby, but the four movies since then seem like lesser efforts, or at least they are more mainstream. His children's Christmas movie starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey, endearingly titled Fruitcake, has been canceled, as has the sequel New Line convinced Waters to write, Hairspray 2: White Lipstick, imagining Tracy in the late 60s during the British Invasion and Vietnam. His wonderful memoir Role Models was the best LGBT book of 2010 according to Bill Clegg and Sebastian Stuart.

Cannes: Ozon, Coens, Polanski, Payne, and Liberace in Competition

The full line-up of the 66th Cannes Film Festival includes the gay glitterbomb Behind the Candelabra and a new new movie from Francois Ozon (whose old new movie opens tomorrow in the US), and many other treats in and out of competition. Speaking of the glitters that aren't gold: I think the revamped Gatsby trailer is among the worst I've ever seen.   

Opening film: The Great Gatsby, dir: Baz Luhrmann
Closing film: Zulu, dir: Jérôme Salle

Competition
Only God Forgives, dir: Nicolas Winding-Refn
La Grande Bellezza, dir: Paolo Sorrentino
Behind The Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh
The Immigrant, dir: James Gray
Venus In Fur, dir: Roman Polanski
Straw Shield, dir: Takashi Miike
Nebraska, dir: Alexander Payne
Jeune Et Jolie, dir: Francois Ozon
The Past, dir: Asghar Farhadi
Inside Llewyn Davis, dir: Joel & Ethan Coen
Jimmy P., dir: Arnaud Desplechin
Heli, dir: Amat Escalante
Grisgris, dir: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Like Father Like Son, dir: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
La Vie D’Adèle, dir: Abdellatif Kechiche
Borgman, dir: Alex Vann Warmerdam
A Touch Of Sin, dir: Zhangke Jia
Michael Kohlhaas, dir: Arnaud Despallières
Un Château En Italie, dir: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi

Un Certain Regard

The Bling Ring, dir: Sofia Coppola (Opening film)
Omar, dir: Hany Abu-Assad
Death March, dir: Adolfo Alix, Jr
Fruitvale: dir: Ryan Coogler
The Bastards, dir: Claire Denis

Behind the Candelabra

Finally, the full trailer. It airs on HBO on May 26.

Born April 6: Rob Epstein

 Rob Epstein is out and makes groundbreaking gay films, yet rather than being shunned by Hollywood, he's won two Academy Awards, three Peabodys, four Emmys, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. And let's not pretend his work was somehow easy just because his subjects are so important; his timing has always been ahead of the zeitgeist. He made The Times of Harvey Milk when people wanted to avoid gay rights; then, with Jeffrey Friedman, Common Threads - Stories from the Quilt when many wanted to demonize aids; The Celluloid Closet when
most wanted to ignore Hollywood's hypocrisy, and Paragraph 175 when some would have rather overlooked the fate of gay men in the Holocaust. Despite the hurdles, the co-directors convinced stars to narrate those last three films: Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, and Rupert Everett. Following their first narrative feature, Howl, Epstein and Friedman return this year with their first-ever non-gay subject, a biopic on June 28: Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried as the 70s queen of porn. Based on reviews from its screening at Sundance, the film has an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Born April 4: Anthony Perkins, Graham Norton

A troubled teen coming of age in the 40s and 50s, Anthony Perkins escaped into acting. He told an interviewer, "There was nothing about me I wanted to be, but I felt happy being somebody else." Uncomfortably gay all his life, he had affairs with Nureyev, Sondheim, Tab Hunter, Christopher Makos, and a six-year relationship with choreographer Glover Dale. At 21 he got his first film role from George Cukor (The Actress written by Ruth Gordon) and he was 28 when Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates in Psycho. A superstar terrified of being outed and unhappily typecast as a homicidal maniac, he fled to Europe where he worked with Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of a Francoise Sagan novel and with Orson Welles in his rehash of Kafka's The Trial. Perkins was 39 before he finally had sex with a woman, his co-star Victoria Principal. When he was 41, he married Marisa Berenson's sister Berry on Cape Cod and they had two sons, named Oz and Elvis, though he continued to have sex with men. Having never been tested, he was horrified in 1990 to learn he was HIV+ from a headline in the National Enquirer, which had obtained a sample of his blood. Still closeted, he worked with aids charities, recorded an epilogue to And the Band Played On, and issued this statement, released upon his death from aids on September 12, 1992: "There are many who believe this disease is God's vengeance. But I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of aids than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." Returning from a vacation on Cape Cod on September 11, 2001, his wife died aboard AA flight 11. Their sons are an actor and a musician. Two biographies are Anthony Perkins: Split Image and Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life.

Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as an interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks up his feet and rolls off the sofa. Norton's two books are a memoir, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.

Gore Vidal & Other Queer Offerings at the Tribeca Film Festival

Premiering at Tribeca next month, Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary also features Christopher Hitchens, Jodie Evans, Tim Robbins, Mikhail Gorbachev, David Mamet, Bob Scheer, Burr Steers, William F. Buckley, Jay Parini, Norman Mailer, Nina Straight, Dick Cavett, and Sting. See it on April 18, 20, or 26.

Gore's book Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia [Kindle] can be yours for a mere $5.58.

Among the other gay films at the festival are GBF, Bridegroom, Floating Skyscrapers (below), and the Elizabeth Bishop - Lota de Macedo Soares story retold in Reaching for the Moon.

Born March 28: Håkan Lindquist, Dirk Bogarde

Is it the mild gay content that prevents the international literary community from adding Håkan Lindquist to the working list of great living Nothernish writers like Gerbrand Bakker, Peter Stamm and Per Petterson (all of them indebted to the magnificent simplicity of lesbian Tove Jansson)? Or is it merely because only two of Håkan's five novels are available in English, and those two were long-distance efforts from a German publisher? Rest assured, his time will come. Until then, you can pride yourself on getting to know this dashing Swede (who splits his time between Stockholm and Berlin) before IMPAC Dublin discovers him. His short, domestic novels tackle eternal themes of family secrets, the nature of love, and the passage of time, with a fresh perspective and a modern, gay naturalism. My Brother and His Brother follows Jonas as he tracks down and uncovers surprising details about Paul, his older brother who died at sixteen the year before Jonas was born. On Collecting Stamps is a beautiful look back, from middle age, as Mattias reconsiders his unconventional friendship, starting at twelve, with a lonely middle-aged stamp collector, Samuel. Notice in both cases the complex double layering of time: At eighteen, Jonas is now older than his "older" brother, and Mattias has reached the same stage of life Samuel was when they met. Brilliant. Read him. (Photo by Yuna Yagi.)

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during WWII, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim, especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) In 1963, Bogarde played the creepy, closety valet in The Servant, and later played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They relented after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. In fact, he destroyed much of his personal archives.

Sony Boss Amy Pascal Nails Hollywood's Dead-Gay Movies, Slurs

The headlines across the web are that Sony chief Amy Pascal called on Hollywood to eliminate anti-gay slurs and stereotypes, but the deeper aspect of her speech last night as she accepted an award from the LA Gay Center at a fundraiser for homeless lgbtq youth was her recognition that film lags years behind television and that most of the very few high-profile gay movies end with a dead queer:

"The Celluloid Closet was made almost 20 years ago and certainly attitudes have changed, but maybe not quite so much as you or I would want or hope. Television has been much more progressive and credit has to be given to producers like Max Mutchnick and David Kohan and Ryan Murphy for really changing things.

"Now movies need to catch up. There are magnificent movies being made about gay subjects with gay characters, like Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Anyone would have been proud to have made those movies. I know I would be. But when you think about some of these films, even our favorite ones, there is a theme that runs through them.

"Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Boys Don’t Cry, Philadelphia, The Hours, Gods and Monsters, The Talented Mr. Ripley, A Single Man, My Own Private Idaho, Cloud Atlas – in all these movies, the main character is murdered or martyred or commits suicide or just dies unhappily. And there are far more pernicious and dangerous images that confront gay kids and their parents: the lesbian murderer, the psychotic transvestite, the queen who is humiliated and sometimes tossed off a ship or a ledge. It’s a big joke. It still happens.

"How many times have you heard a character imply to another that the worst thing about going to prison isn’t being locked up for the rest of your life, it’s the homosexuality? And old stereotypes still exist. The most benign stereotypes would have a gay kid believe that they will end up being the asexual, witty best friend of the pretty girl, or a drag queen, or a swishy hairdresser. The list goes on.

"Of course, there are great images, too, like the family in The Kids Are All Right. The way the boy in Perks of Being a Wallflower and the middle-aged man in Hotel Marigold and the 75-year-old man in Beginners come out to a better, richer, more fulfilled life. It’s treated as a celebration.

"And real credit has to be given to the filmmakers of ParaNorman, Chris Butler and Sam Fell, who had the first gay character in an animated movie, and he was the football hunk and it was totally incidental to the plot.

"Now it’s time for all of us to take that step. Not every gay character needs to be defined by his or her sexuality. Can’t being gay just be one stitch in the fabric of someone’s life? Can’t we depict men and women who just so happen to be gay – perhaps a lawyer or soldier or business executive or scientist or engineer…

"We need to create an atmosphere that encourages people to speak up, so we get this right.

"How about next time, when any of us are reading a script and it says words like fag, or faggot – homo – dyke – take a pencil and just cross it out. Just don’t do it."

The deluge of hostile comments at the industry's go-to site Deadline Hollywood are overwhelmingly anti-liberal, anti-PC, anti-equality, and anti-what Amy said. If you're inclined, add your voice of reason.

Lore

By far the best movie so far of 2013 is Lore, based on Rachel Seiffert's debut novel The Dark Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker and won the Los Angeles Times Prize for first fiction. Brilliantly acted, beautifully shot, the film follows the disintegration of a German family in the wake of WWII. After fleeing their home for a rustic farmhouse where they are not wanted, the Nazi father leaves forever and the brittle, devastated mother soon abandons the five children to turn herself in, sparing them/herself the experience of the police dragging her away to a camp. The proud, uncomprehending children still expect to win the war and still expect a train to take them north to grandmother's house. They have a lot of unwanted truths to face, as does the defeated nation at large. Though the movie wisely stays entirely on them during their long walk north, around the edges you get perfect moments of Germans' bitter disillusionment and angry, willful ignorance. (At aid stations, they claim the posted newspaper clippings of death camp victims are fakes, staged by the Americans.) Viewers who complain the children aren't likable enough, or the ending isn't happy enough, must be looking for sheer entertainment rather than art. Lore ranks with The White Ribbon, The Reader, and Downfall.

Released last month, it's down to one screen in Manhattan. Don't miss it.

Peter Cameron Films: 'Andorra' Coming, 'Someday This Pain' Now on DVD

In an exclusive, Deadline Hollywood is reporting great news:

"Jamie Bialkower’s Melbourne-based Jump Street Films has optioned New York writer Peter Cameron’s novel Andorra and will produce the film adaptation in partnership with Cargo Entertainment. Cameron is writing the screenplay for the saga of Alexander Fox, an elegant gent who leaves the States to start a new life in the tiny nation of Andorra. He’s quickly drawn to two women – a tall, cool Australian blonde with a giant dog, and the reserved, heartbroken daughter of the town’s matriarch. When a dead body turns up in the harbor Fox finds he’s the prime suspect. Bialkower tells Deadline production is scheduled for 2014 in Europe and Australia. No director is set yet."

Andorra is the fourth of Peter's six novels to be filmed.

Last week was the dvd release of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You starring Ellen Burstyn, Peter Gallagher, Marcia Gay Harden, Stephen Lang, Lucy Liu, Aubrey Plaza, and Toby Rego as the immortal, adorable gay teen hero James Sveck.

Although it can't quite capture the novel's full grace and magic, the Merchant-Ivory The City of Your Final Destination makes its points with an elegant ensemble of Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the amazing Norma Aleandro.

How To Survive a Plague DVD, Miniseries

After losing the Spirit Award to Kirby Dick's important doc The Invisible War and losing the Oscar to feelgood fare Searching for Sugar Man, David France's really excellent film about aids and ACT UP, How to Survive a Plague, is now available on DVD or can be seen online instantly.

Last week, ABC optioned a scripted miniseries that will be more or less based on people in the documentary, covering the core years 1987 to 1996. David France is writing it and he said the cast "will be a tight ensemble. A handful of people with almost nothing in common but their shared battle against the epidemic."

EW had more:

"France, and his producing partner Howard Gertler will both serve as Executive Producers on the project, alongside former Focus Features president of production John Lyons (Boogie Nights, Pieces of April). "ABC is really the perfect match for this. ABC is the network that brought us Roots and so many other enormous and seminal miniseries. But Roots is such an important touchstone for me because it was really about the arrival of the African American people to full citizenship, and how that happened," France said. "That’s the same kind of trajectory that we see with the arrival of the gay and lesbian community to full involvement in public life. That happened in a much quicker timeline, but in a way I think that How To Survive A Plague the miniseries will tell that parallel story. And ABC knows how to do that. I was thrilled that they wanted to do this, and that they saw that it was part of their cultural tradition to tell these enormous stories that really changed the way generations of people think about a certain part of our history."

Born March 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Poet, philosopher, novelist, newspaper columnist, playwright, painter, actor, and atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a communist until he was kicked out of the party in 1949 for being gay, which they discovered when he was charged with corrupting minors and obscene acts in public. He was twenty-seven and he was not convicted, but he had to leave their small town northwest of Trieste and, with his mother, moved to Rome. Enduring difficult years being unemployed or underemployed, he published his first important collection of poems in 1954, followed the next year by his first novel, Ragazzi di vita [Boys of Life], which caused a sensation for its raw look at the aimless lives of petty criminals and sometimes hustlers in Rome's roughest neighborhoods.

In 1957 he helped write Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, and three years after that he landed his debut acting role. The following year, 1961, he directed Accattone, the first of his twenty films. In Teorema, Terrence Stamp plays a stranger who moves in with family in Milan and one by one has sex with everyone: the religious maid, the artistic son, the frigid mother, the wallflower daughter, and lastly the father, then leaves and they all fall apart. That was an original screenplay, but many of his later and most celebrated films were adaptations of classics, often infused with nudity and sex: Oedipus Rex, Medea (starring Maria Callas, not singing), The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and 120 Days of Sodom. Several of his movies featured Ninetto Davoli, his boyfriend since 1963 when he was fifteen.

Throughout the summer of 1975, as he was trying to complete his version of de Sade, Pasolini warned friends he would be killed by the mafia. In November, he picked up a seventeen year-old hustler and was murdered by being run over by his own car. In 2005, the hustler recanted his confession and said three men with Southern Italian accents killed Pasolini. Key details of the crime make it seem impossible to have been perpetrated by a lone person. A longtime friend, the artist Giuseppe Zigaina, is just one of many who believes the always theatrical, always contrarian Pasolini organized his own death. He was fifty-three. Forty-one years after its release, 120 Days of Sodom was named by Time Out's Film Guide as cinema's all-time most controversial film. Steve N. says you must experience Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma.

Berlinale Teddy Awards: In The Name Of, Bambi, Concussion

Last night the Teddy Awards for the best queer movies at the 63rd Berlin Film Festival, the big winner was the drama In the Name Of about a tempted gay priest working with tough youths in a remote Polish village (above). In addition to winning the Teddy, Malgorzata Szumowska's feature also won the audience award. 

Best documentary was awarded to Bambi, a portrait of a Algerian trans woman who was born in 1935 and began performing cabaret in Paris in the 1950s.

A special jury prize was given to Concussion, the lesbian drama directed by Stacie Passon that recently screened at Sundance.

Click here for a full list of forty queer films at the Berlinale, including Free Fall about a man who unexpectedly falls in love with another fellow in his police training program (below); White Night about a Seoul hookup between two men who never stay still, Won-Gyu, a flight attendant and Tae-Jun, a bike courier; Exposed, Beth B's look at the new burlesque; and a documentary about Paul Bowles called The Cage Door Is Always Open.

Born February 16: John Schlesinger

Forty-four years ago this May, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy rode into movie theaters and later won Oscars for best picture, director, and screenplay. The gay story of the Bronx's own Ratso Rizzo and Texan Joe Buck earned an X rating (which back then simply meant no one under 17, not porn) and bizarre reviews from the likes of Vincent Canby in the NYT. Schlesinger had previously made one of the first "swinging London" movies, Darling, (winning Julie Christie her best actress Oscar), and later made the bi Sunday Bloody Sunday, the first widely distributed film to show two men making love. His daring dwindled with the passing decades: The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man, Yanks, The Falcon and the Snowman, Madame Sousatzka, Pacific Heights, and the indie favorite Cold Comfort Farm. His last movie was the regrettable Madonna - Rupert Everett vehicle, The Next Best Thing in 2000. The London-born Schlesinger lived in Palm Springs with his partner of more than thirty years, Michael Childers, until his death in 2003. Read William Mann's biography Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger or Ian Buruma's Conversations with John Schlesinger.

Naomi Watts in The Impossible 2

 

Of all Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's stories, director Anne Fontaine chose to film The Grandmothers,about two sexy moms who each start sleeping with the other's hot son. In the story, the affairs last from the time the lads are in their late teens to their 30s, when the moms finally break it off and the hurt young men never forgive them. Looks like the movie collapses time to a shorter span. For fun, imagine how the gay dad version of this "daring," "brave," "surprising love story" would be greeted by studios, stars, and critics.

The Australian movie starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright Penn opens in France on April 3 under the title Perfect Mothers. It releases in the US with the title Two Mothers. In any language, the music is so awful you'll think it's a parody, a la the Samberg - Timberlake Mother Lover.

Born February 8: James Dean, Elizabeth Bishop

 

Photo by Richard C. Miller, available for $10,350.

Dead at 24, the Hoosier native, the Hollywood icon, James Dean became the first actor to be nominated posthumously for an Oscar in 1955 for East of Eden and is the only actor to be twice nominated after death, the second time for Giant in 1956. That same year saw the publication of his first biography, which, no surprise, was also the first in a long line of books and biopics to degay him, even though it was written by one of his lovers, William Bast. Exactly 50 years later, in 2006, Bast finally came clean about their affair in a second book, Surviving James Dean. Just a few of the many others beyond Bast to say Dean was definitely gay, not bi, or experimenting, or 'confused about his sexuality,' are the director Nicholas Ray, the screenwriter Gavin Lambert, and biographer Paul Alexander, author of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. One book that cheaply sidesteps his homosexuality is George Perry's recent James Dean, nonetheless worthwhile for its photos. He would be 82 today, the same age as Clint Eastwood.

 

Elizabeth Bishop's father died before her first birthday and at five she saw her mother institutionalized for mental illness, from which she never recovered. It is said Elizabeth never again saw her mother, who died eighteen years later, still locked up. Orphaned, Elizabeth grew up happily with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, then unhappily with her other grandparents in Worcester, then with an aunt's family in Revere. In the fall of 1929 she entered Vassar where she later met Marianne Moore. After graduation, an inheritance allowed her to travel and write poetry. She lived in France and shared a house in Key West with a college friend, the stationery heiress Louise Crane (whose father was governor of Massachusetts and a US senator and whose mother was a founder of MoMA). Bishop published her first book of poems, North & South, in 1946 and three years later was Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1951 she set off to go around South America by boat. Expecting to stay in Brazil for two weeks, she stayed seventeen years, thanks to her long relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares. In 1956 Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize, but happy times gave way to depression, tantrums, and alcoholism. Lota killed herself in 1967. Two years later, Bishop won the National Book Award for her Complete Poems. In 1976 she published her final volume of new work and became the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (and she's still the only American to have won it). A lesbian and a self-described feminist, she lived through the 60s and 70s shunning the women's movement and always refused to let her work be included in anthologies of female writers. Her second long-term relationship, with Alice Methfessel, lasted until her death at 68 in 1979. Intelligent readers now have three important places to start with Bishop: her Poems, her Prose, and Michael Sledge's novel The More I Owe You [Kindle], winner of the Ferro Grumley and a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award.