Don's Picks

In the nineties, there was a burgeoning of new cinematic voices hitting Hollywood. One of the most memorable was Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho. The movie about two street hustlers played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves leaving the street culture of Portland to search for the mother of one of them. Phoenix's performance established him as one of the greatest of his generation of actors.

As part of the same movement of new voices, filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs created the poetic documentary, Tongues Untied which showed the plight faced by many Black gay men who were excluded both from the Black community and the gay community for intersectional reasons. Happily the film has been restored and preserved with Riggs' other works in a Criterion box set The Signifyin' Works of Marlon Riggs with many extras that help with understanding the film's importance.

Another startling documentary from this time period and well before RuPaul's Drag Race, the phenomena of drag was explored and celebrated in the documentary, Paris is Burning. During a time when drag was a more obscure subculture and with the AIDS virus decimating the gay community the joy of performance and creativity burns bright against the darkness.

Alfred Hitchcock's Rope about two college students murdering a classmate for intellectual reasons and then throwing a party for the victim's family (where the victim's body is hidden) is full of gay subtext.  The film was written by a gay writer, Arthur Laurents and starred two gay actors, John Dall and Farley Granger (who was born in San Jose, CA) as the murderers. The movie is also significant for its long takes and being largely shot within a single movable set which separated and moved around the bulky film cameras.  A curio worth checking out.

Set in the 1950's, but made in the mid 1980's the groundbreaking romantic film Desert Hearts became a cult hit because of its frank romance between two women. A professor arrives in Nevada to get a divorce and finds herself attracted to a woman working at the ranch she is staying at. The film feels less radical now but the sense of boundaries being broken is strong. Its refusal to punish its characters for breaking those boundaries remains refreshing.

Some great listens for Pride include Now, That's What I Call Pride a terrific collection of classic and contemporary pride themed songs.

On Broadway, there are many musical adaptations that "queer" their original material and won Tony Awards for their leading actors.  Santino Fontano won a Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for the Broadway musicalized Tootsie which manages to update the original film's cross dressing premise and make it more inclusive. J. Harrison Ghee made Tony Award history for being the first non-binary actor to win the Best Actor in a Musical Tony for the musical version of Some Like It Hot.  The adaptation features more outwardly queer characters than the delightful film classic it's based on. Finally, Harvey Fierstein won a groundbreaking Tony award in the same category for the delightful musical Hairspray which, like Some Like it Hot, features a song score by the great Marc Shaiman, a gay composer.  The film that inspired the musical John Water's Hairspray is also worth checking out.