Kenny Mellman couldn't show the movie clips he wanted to at Thursday's screening in the 92Y Tribeca's ongoing Queer/Art/Film series because he said he couldn't get them, even when he went directly to the filmmakers. So he presented an evening of tv clips (Queer and Available?), starting with two Pet Shop Boys video clips directed by Derek Jarman, It's a Sin and Rent. Next came scenes from an episode of MTV's series "Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes" starring Debbie Harry, Jerry Hall, a young Lady Bunny, and a really wonderful segment with John Kelly as himself backstage and as Dagmar Onasis in the spotlight. (Be mesmerized by a different clip of him as her here.) (Kelly presented an earlier night in the series, showing Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.) Mellman ran a clip of Wayland Flowers on a cable access show in which Madame could speak uncensored and her exuberantly filthy talk was a camp revelation, as was Flowers' manipulation of her form. Shockingly expressive for a hard plastic puppet. A toned-down but no less sex obsessed Madame also appeared in the night's highlight, a screening of "The Beatrice Arthur Special," filmed in 1979 and aired in 1980, co-starring Rock Hudson and Melba Moore. One skit of a widow talking to her husband's casket featured his two mistresses and ended with the surprise of his male lover, but all the sequences had queer undertones of varying degrees. Check out this gospel revival number by Sistah Love
and friends.
The series continues this Thursday withLisa Kron presenting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, July 16 with Thomas Allen Harris screening Tongues United, and Sarah Schulman showing Chantal Ackerman's overtly lesbian film from 1974, Je, Tu, Il, Elle.
Please turn off your computer, leave your apartment, and support innovative series like this one co-curated by Adam Baran and the superb film director Ira Sachs. The night I attended the audience was five people.
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