Pride Month Doc Corner: Keith Haring, Curve magazine and Intersex

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month where every week we focus on documentaries with queer themes. For the final edition (albeit on the 1st of July, sshhh), we are putting a brief spotlight on a few films that I have watched recently that should hopefully their way to audience’s over the coming months through queer film festivals (virtual or otherwise) and streaming.

by Glenn Dunks

Just by pure virtue of his being a central figure in New York City’s modern art scene of the 1980s, Keith Haring’s name comes up often in the films about the era. There are probably a dozen movies about him either as the central figure, or one of a whole scene that is easy to rhapsodize nostalgic about.

Perhaps after Ben Anthony’s Keith Haring: Street Art Boy, which is screening as a part of Sheffield Doc/Fest and streaming soon, there won’t be a need for that...

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Filming the Marvelous Mrs Maisel's Musical Numbers

Guest Blog Day! Please welcome Tom Mizer, one half of the songwriting team Mizer & Moore (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel), a longtime TFE reader and previous Smackdown panelist. 

me on the set of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. A dream come true

by Tom Mizer

When Amy Sherman-Palladino, the producer/director/creator and all-around whiz-bang brain of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, asked my writing partner Curtis Moore and I to write original music for the third season, we knew immediately it was going to be a big challenge. (Also, let’s be honest, wicked cool.) The songs needed to sit alongside the needle-drop classics they deploy so expertly on the show (don’t tell anyone but the show is a musical in perfectly pink disguise). They needed to help tell the story and illuminate character while also being believable pop hits of 1959. They also needed to be written, approved, and recorded before filming in a few weeks. So, yeah, just a wee bit challenging.

What we didn’t know was how welcomed we'd be into the “family” of the show. Instead of just turning in demos and hoping for the best --fly free little songs, fly free! -- we were invited to collaborate during the whole process....

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Landmark gay adult film Passing Strangers (1974), restored

by Nathaniel R

If you use movies for time travel, as we often suggest people should given that they're cheaper than time machines, you could do worse than renting the restored 1974 porn Passing Strangers.  The site Pink Label.TV, which is queer owned and operated, and specializes in ethical and niche adult queer indie fare is currently hosting a restored print. It's the latest restoration for the work of the trailblazing filmmaker Arthur J Bressan Jr. Bressan also made the landmark gay drama Buddies (1981) and the documentary Gay USA  (1977) which Glenn recently raved about. His earlier porn, Passing Strangers, emerged during that brief heyday in the 1970s when mainstream media was taking porn seriously -- think Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door's blockbuster box office.

More, but definitely NSFW, after the jump...

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Loving "Love, Victor"

by Nathaniel R

Is this what good fan-fiction is like? In the first awkward episode of Love, Victor... and, again in the eighth "very special" cringe-worthy episode, and, fiiine, in scattered bits inbetween in virtually all episodes, the new Hulu series perpetually draws attention to the fact that it's inspired by the motion picture Love, Simon (2018). That said it wisely positions itself as a sequel, rather than a remake.

Instead of writing to a mysterious gay schoolmate online as Simon did in the first mainstream wide release gay romcom, Victor writes to Simon himself, inspired by his story and perpetually sliding into his DMs asking for advice...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Welcome to Chechnya' is brave, confronting cinema

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week we are looking at the latest film from the Oscar-nominated director of How to Survive a Plague.

By Glenn Dunks

We may find ourselves every June celebrating “pride”, but it is important to remember that it started from a fireball of anger. A fist of societal and cultural agitation that in a single moment decided it was going to fight back against oppression and violence. It may be more than 50 years later, but it’s an unfortunate fact that even in the most modern of societies, people who identify as LGBTIQ or non-binary still face the world with varying degrees of awareness about our otherness. And while many may not choose to dwell on it, there is the ever-present knowledge that those like us around the world are being bullied, harassed, targeted, punished, hunted and killed on a daily basis --and that’s before we get into when sexuality and gender identity intersect with race, religion and nationality.

It’s hardly hidden but it can be easily neglected, which is where a film like David France’s Welcome to Chechnya comes in...

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