It’s Sunday, and I feel hungover. Yesterday I went to the Alki Beach Pride celebration in West Seattle with a small group of gay guys — a few of whom I knew well, others not at all — and spent a lovely, late summer afternoon by Elliot Bay floating from cluster to cluster of friends and acquaintances, both old and new, all connected by a complex web of queer communal bonds. One of these guys introduced me to a term…

I’m pulling a Miyazaki and coming out of semi-retirement to capture a few thoughts about this great film. I’ll drop a minor disclaimer first: as a fellow Gen X-er, Haigh has calibrated all the dials to be perfectly attuned to my own gay wavelength, so results may vary for other demographic flavors of queer. Having said that, I think he’s given us what may be the ne plus ultra meditation on the trope of gay loneliness. 

Although it might be…

The artist known as Luther Price never publicly revealed his given name. Although he worked under various other pseudonyms — including Tom Rhoads, Brigk Aethy, and my favorite, Fag — his best-known moniker stuck with him the longest perhaps because it’s an especially fitting mashup of Martin Luther and Vincent Price. Much like his chosen name, Sodom is part revelatory religious vision and part low-budget camp horror. Assembled from gay porno loops he discovered behind a dirty bookstore in Boston,…

Some years ago, I saw a James Turrell installation which required the viewers to lie on their backs and look up at a scrim whose color very gradually shifted from one hue to the next. These transitions were so slow as to be imperceptible in the moment, like the movement of the hands on a clock. Misericordia provides its audience with a remarkably similar experience, and because so much of the film’s pleasure and impact derives from not ing the…

With this louche adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s least produced play, Ken Russell solidifies his status as an honorary gay. To this day, I’m gobsmacked that a straight man was able to crack the genetic code of camp sensibility so completely and definitively. And the fact that he was able to do it so quickly and on such a low-budget  — the film was cranked out as part of a three picture deal with Vestron — makes the accomplishment all the…