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rgr-pop · 4 months

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My goal for the year was to watch & log 100 movies. Shorts count, didn't matter whether I had seen them before, but they can only count once for the year. I logged 117!

First & last watched: Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)--the reason I cared about movies so much this year, just an obvious life-changer for me--and Ken Russell's The Rainbow (1989)--Westlin's suggestion for the perfect round out. Surprised to be surprised by how good it was. Great films! Totally on the program! Questions to this day unanswered! Let's go!

Shorts (everything short of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) watched: 16

Favorite shorts: Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956) (decided this year one of my all-time favorite films); Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950); Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)

Next year my shorts watching will be more programmatic

Films I watched twice in 2023: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987) (another film I realized this year obviously belongs in my top ten--more specifically I decided finally that this is my favorite non-Texas Chain Saw film); Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023); The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993)

By decade: Before 1900: 0 1900 - 1910: 1 1910 - 1919: 1 1920 - 1929: 1 bro come ON what the FUCK 1930 - 1939: 1 im literally evil 1940 - 1949: 7 1950 - 1959: 3 1960 - 1969: 24 1970 - 1979: 14 1980 - 1989: 16 1990 - 1999: 17 2000 - 2009: 13 2010 - 2019: 9 2020 - 2023: 10

By nation/language roughly: uk/english: 6 us/english: 66 canada/english: 6 france/french: 10 italy/italian: 4 italy/france/french: 1 italy/english: 1 czechoslovakia/czech: 5 palestine/arabic: 3 soviet/russian: 2 russia/russian: 1 austria/german: 1 austria/french: 1 spain/spanish: 1 japan/japanese: 1 poland/yiddish: 1 poland/polish: 1 senegal/wolof: 1 brazil/portuguese: 1 sweden/swedish: 1 eur/farsi: 1 south africa/afrikaans: 1

numbers not adding up there but w/e

By director: Not sure if this is surprising or totally unsurprising, but in spite of my auteurial talk (and all the thematic/completionist plans I like to make), I very rarely watched more than two movies by the same director. I can't decide how I feel about this, nor do I know how to proceed this year given that my goal is to discover who my top five directors might actually be. How do you go about investigating that?

Overwhelmingly the director I watched the most was Adrian Lyne, with five films. I have a few more things to work on but I'm close to done with my shakedown/theory. Neither my favorite director nor favorite guy, I would say I probably 'enjoy' and 'personally get more out of watching' his films more than most. In second place, I watched three Kenneth Anger films--all shorts of course. I watched two films each by the following directors: Ken Russell, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ti West, Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke, Jan Švankmajer (both shorts), and Billy Wilder (one of which being a war department documentary short).

I have mixed feelings about this approach (let me watch man movies if i I want to!) but a quick skim suggests I watched about 15 films directed by women (12%)--lower than expected and probably low for me typically. I always have a romance habit on the backburner so it's never hard for me to watch a lot of movies by women, but obviously my focus on revered directors I never previously wanted to spend time on has had an impact here, meaning I should make an effort with Great women directors in 2024 to keep that in check. I will also say that I specifically recall having a hard time getting my hands on things I wanted to watch by women in a few different cases, including by Great women directors (Barbara Hammer and Akerman), and especially also soviet women directors. There's an overlap here with difficulty accessing short films!

I'm not an active or thoughtful starrer, but these are the films I watched in 2023 that I've given five stars to:

Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969) (upgraded from four after the year of appreciating it) Mandabi (Ousmane Sembène, 1968) Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956) Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) (demoted Teorema [1968] to four stars to prevent Salo is A Perfect Film deflation) Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950)

Least favorite films watched in 2023: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019), Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023), All My Good Countrymen (Vojtěch Jasný, 1968), Zahrada (Jan Švankmajer, 1968), the one streaming true crime doc I watched that I then had to log (will not repeat in 2024)

Loved/treats for me: Barry Lyndon, Crossing Delancey, Unfaithful, The Cremator, The Night Porter, Cabaret, talking to people about Funny Games and realizing I love it more than I think I do

Recommended for the romance girls as a thank you for the good romance you have recommended me: Habibi (Susan Youssef, 2011)

Most incredible movie experience of the year by miles and I can only hope 2024 has something this good to offer: House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003) anniversary screening my birthweek

The otherwise defining film of 2023 for me: Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005)

Onward! Back to work! On the Terror and Violence line! The Family is out there, comfortable, in relative peace…

#film #violence factory

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homomenhommes · 3 months

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … February 3

Francis Douglas (R) with his brother Alfred

1867 – Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig (d.1894) was a Scottish nobleman and politician, the eldest son of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry.

He was educated at Harrow School and later served as a private secretary to the Liberal politician and Prime Minister Archibald Primrose, Lord Rosebery. Thanks to Rosebery's patronage, on 22 June 1893 he was raised to the Peerage of the United Kingdom as Baron Kelhead, of Kelhead in the County of Dumfries. This provided him with a seat in the House of Lords.

Drumlanrig's father served in Parliament from 1872 to 1880 as a representative peer, but in 1880 he refused, as an atheist, to take the religious oath of allegiance to the Queen. He was not allowed to take his seat and was never again chosen as representative peer by the Scottish nobles. His son's accession to Parliament as the 1st Baron Kelhead precipitated a bitter dispute between them and also between Queensberry and Lord Rosebery, who became Prime Minister in 1894.

In October 1894, eighteen months after his ennoblement, Drumlanrig died in what may have been a hunting accident or suicide. He was unmarried and his younger brother Lord Percy Douglas became heir to his father's titles.

It was speculated at the time, and evidence suggests that Drumlanrig may have had a homosexual relationship with Rosebery, and further, that Queensberry had threatened to expose the Prime Minister's supposed proclivities if his government did not vigorously prosecute Oscar Wilde in the affair stemming from Wilde's relationship with Francis Douglas's younger brother Lord Alfred Douglas. Rosebery was, by most accounts, happily married until the death of his wife in 1890, though gossip that Rosebery was homosexual or bisexual was indeed widespread. Queensberry believed that, as he phrased it to Lord Alfred in a letter, 'Snob Queers like Rosebery' had corrupted his sons, and held the Prime Minister indirectly responsible for Drumlanrig's death.

1927 – Kenneth Anger, American Underground Filmmaker, born (d.2023); One of America's first openly Gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner, Kenneth Anger occupies an important place in the history of experimental filmmaking. His role in rendering Gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate.

In 1947, Anger gained instant notoriety with Fireworks, a homoerotic nightmare/reverie in which a muscle-bound sailor enjoys posing for the protagonist's (Anger's) delectation, but then, with four others, bashes the youth in a public restroom. Despite the horrific scenario, the ending suggests redemption with milky fluid spattering Anger's body, a sympathetic sailor's crotch spewing white sparks from a Roman candle, and Anger resurrected, wearing a flaming Christmas tree headdress.

Some early Anger works never made it to the controversial screening stage because negatives were confiscated and destroyed by self-policing labs to which he had sent film for processing. Conversely, other viewers were overly appreciative of Anger's eroticism, pirating and showing his films in nightclubs during an era when Gay porn was largely unavailable.

Similarly, the pervasiveness of iconic Gay imagery in Anger's work, such as the leather-clad bikers of Scorpio Rising (1963), often caused his films to be grossly oversimplified as depictions of homosexual "pathology," rather than understood as critiques of American mass culture, particularly as it was propagated by Hollywood movies and the rock-and-roll music that Anger used for his soundtracks in pioneering ways, critically anticipating the music-video genre.

In unfinished film projects such as Puce Moment (1949), with its close-up sequence of women's gowns, and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), in which a youth caresses a hot-rod with a powder puff, Anger inventories American culture's most fetishized objects, evoking a profoundly camp sensibility. Elsewhere, in Eaux d'artifice (1953), whatever Gay content does exist—Anger cites Ronald Firbank's novel Valmouth as inspiration and has likened the fountain imagery to sexual water-sports—is subordinate to the film's elegant visual abstractions.

Although Fireworks and Scorpio Rising had earned him a reputation as an underground Gay filmmaker, through the late 1960s and 1970s, Anger's films expressed less specifically Gay content. His longtime fascination with the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley, which had imparted a dark, ritualistic atmosphere to even his earliest films, propelled works such as Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1973). Collaborative projects with Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page recalled Anger's earlier professional engagements with Jean Cocteau, Anaïs Nin, and other iconoclasts, but the results fell short of Anger's expectations and, indeed, abilities.

Through the 1980s, Anger became known to a broader public through the film adaptation of his lurid book Hollywood Babylon (1958), which chronicled scandals of the film industry. Hollywood Babylon is, in essence, a counter-accusation of indecency and intemperance against America's self-righteous film establishment, an institution that at mid-century was so fearful of scandal that only underground filmmakers risked depicting overtly sexual content and exploring radical cinematic forms.

1936 – James Bridges was an American screenwriter and film director. (d.1993) Bridges was born in Paris, Arkansas. He got his start as a writer for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and one of his episodes, 'An Unlocked Window', earned him a 1966 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Episode in a TV Series.

He went on to write and direct a number of notable films, including The Baby Maker (1970), The Paper Chase (1973), The China Syndrome (1979), Urban Cowboy (1980), Perfect (1985), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988).

From 1958 until his death in 1993, his life partner was actor Jack Larson, best known for his portrayal of Jimmy Olsen in the TV series Adventures of Superman. Bridges died in Los Angeles, California of cancer. The James Bridges Theater at University of California, Los Angeles was named in his honor in November 1999. Bridges was a faculty member there early in his career.

1950 – Ron Woodroof (d.1992) was an American who created what would become known as the Dallas Buyers Club in March 1988. Contracting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the 1980s, he created the group as part of his efforts to find and distribute drugs to treat HIV at a time when the disease was poorly understood.

He sued the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over a ban on a drug he was using.

Woodroof was born in Dallas, Texas. His first marriage was to Mary Etta Pybus on June 28, 1969, in Dallas; and they had a daughter born in 1970. They divorced in 1972. On May 6, 1972, he married Rory S. Flynn in Dallas. They divorced in 1973. He then married Brenda Shari Robin on October, 1982, in Lubbock. They divorced on March 4, 1986, after he was diagnosed with HIV.

He had a mercurial personality. One reporter writes that "Woodroof took guns to his doctor’s office, prompting Dr. Steven Pounders to 'fire him as a patient.'" Woodroof later sent the doctor roses, and the doctor took him back.

Some of his friends told reporters he was gay or bisexual. Accounts differ on whether he made homophobic comments. Reporter and screenwriter Craig Borten has said Woodroof was "as racist and homophobic as they come" while friends reportedly claim the opposite.

Seven years following his diagnosis of HIV, Ron Woodroof died on September 12, 1992 from pneumonia brought on by AIDS. Woodroof's final years became the basis of the 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club. He was portrayed in the film by Matthew McConaughey, who was critically acclaimed for his performance and won many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor.

1957 – Marlon Riggs, was a gay African-American filmmaker, educator, poet, and gay rights activist. (d.1994) He produced, wrote, and directed several television documentaries, including Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, and Black Is. . . Black Ain't.

Riggs was critical of American racism and homophobia. He used his films to show positive images of African-American culture as well as those of physical and emotional love between black men in order to challenge representations of African Americans and black gay men in popular culture.

"Blacks are inferior because they are not white. Black gays are unnatural because they are not straight. Majority representations of both affirm the view that blackness and gayness constitute a fundamental rupture in the order of things, that our very existence is an affront to nature and humanity."

Soon after arriving in California Riggs settled in Oakland. For 15 years, he made his home with his life companion Jack Vincent. In 1988, while working on Tongues Untied, Riggs was diagnosed with HIV after undergoing treatment for near-fatal kidney failure at a hospital in Germany.

Riggs was inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame in 2006. He produced many documentaries for public television, some of which were controversial like Tongues Untied, being protested by media watchdog groups because they were produced with money from the National Endowment for the Arts. One of his notable students was San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker Sam Green.

Marlon Riggs died from HIV/AIDS related illness in 1994. His death came prior to completion of his final work, Black Is...Black Ain't, a film about sexism and homophobia in African-American communities.

1964 – Gengoroh Tagame is a pseudonymous Japanese manga artist and art historian. He is one of the most influential creators of gay manga, noted for his works depicting graphic themes of sadomasochism, sexual violence, and hypermasculinity. His later work includes the all-ages manga series My Brother's Husband and Our Colors.

Tagame was born into a family descended from samurai. He studied graphic design at Tama Art University, and after graduating in 1982, worked as a commercial art director. On a trip to Europe, Tagame discovered the American leather magazine Drummer. The magazine, which featured drawings by Bill Ward, would make strong impression on Tagame's art. He began publishing erotica under the pen name Gengoroh Tagame in 1986, and since 1994 he has lived off the profits of his art and writings. Tagame's works have been published in several Japanese gay magazines, including Sabu, G-men and SM-Z.

Typical Tagame gay manga

His works contain "virile males, or youths, and their apprenticeship of physical and mental submission". Notable works include Jujitsu Kyoshi at B Product; Emono, Shirogane no Hana (3 vol.) and Pride (3 vol.) at G-Project. Pride focuses on a masculine power top who is discovered by his even more masculine professor to harbor masochistic tendencies, and trains him to be submissive through harsh domination. Naburi mono, ("Laughing stock") serialised in G-Men in 1994, is about a yakuza strongman who falls in love with a wrestler he has been ordered to kidnap, ending with their ritualistic suicide together.

Tagame is additionally noted as an art historian and archivist of gay Japanese erotica, and has edited a two volume artbook series about the history of gay erotic art in Japan from the 1950s to the present, Nihon no gei, erotikku āto, Gay Erotic Art in Japan).

In the mid-2010s, Tagame began creating all-ages manga in addition to his erotic works. His first all-ages work was Otouto no Otto (My Brother's Husband), serialized in Futabasha's Monthly Action magazine in Japan and published in English by Pantheon Books. The series received universal acclaim, and has been awarded excellence awards at the 19th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2015, and the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 2018. In March 2018, Monthly Action began serialization of Our Colors, Tagame's second all-ages manga.

1969 – Paul Babeu is the elected sheriff of Pinal County in the U.S. state of Arizona. First voted into office in 2008 by defeating the Democratic incumbent, Babeu became the first Republican Sheriff elected in the history of Pinal County. He has received national media attention for speaking out against illegal immigration, the unsecured U.S. border with Mexico, and Operation Fast and Furious gun smuggling facilitated by the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In October 2011, Babeu announced the formation of an exploratory committee to run for U.S. Congress, but later decided against running. Babeu won reelection to a second term as sheriff on November 6, 2012.

In February 2012, Babeu was accused of threats of deportation by a Mexican man who described himself as a former boyfriend of Babeu. A spokesman for Babeu denied the allegation and described them as "sensationalist". The spokesman confirmed that Babeu would continue to run for U.S. Congress.

The day after the story broke, Babeu, then a surrogate for Mitt Romney's campaign, officially acknowledged his sexuality but denied the charges. Babeu claimed his sexual orientation was the only factual statement from the allegations. Later, in May, he told openly gay journalist Don Lemon he wants to provide a bridge between the GOP and LGBT communities. He later won reelection as Sheriff of Maricopa County Pinal County by a large margin.

1971 – Hong Seok-cheon is a South Korean actor, television personality, restaurateur and member of the Democratic Labor Party. He caused considerable controversy in his home country when he came out as gay in 2000, and remains the most prominent openly gay celebrity in Korea.

Hong Seok-cheon was born in Cheongyang County in South Chungcheong Province. He began his entertainment career as a male model, and made his screen debut in 1994 as a reporter for Live TV Information Center. In 1995, he won the bronze prize at the KBS Comedian Festival (for college students). Due to his versatility and comic timing, Hong went on to a prolific career on South Korean television, appearing in children's programs and variety shows, as well as sitcoms and dramas.

In 2000, Hong was asked a question regarding his sexuality on a variety show, and he chose to answer honestly that he was gay. Though the show's producers initially edited out the exchange, a journalist got wind of the story and pressed Hong to confirm his admission. After Hong revealed his homosexuality, he was fired from his network television programs and advertisements amidst public uproar, and no longer landed any major acting roles. He faced massive stigma after becoming the country's first openly gay celebrity, and later said he experienced shunning, verbal abuse and discrimination that he rarely stepped out of his social circle. He then wrote his memoir My Heart Still Throbs for Forgotten Love, in which he recounted his failed romance with a Dutch man named Tony.

Forced out of the entertainment business, Hong decided stay in Korea to prove to his detractors that he could be a success. He started his first restaurant Our Place in 2002, two years after he came out. He now owns and runs nine high-end restaurants in Itaewon, home to a large expat community in Seoul. Hong's restaurants are all characterized by the prefix "My," namely: My Hong, My Chi chi*s, My Thai, My Thai China, My X, My Chelsea, My Noodle, and My Suji.

In 2004, he joined the Democratic Labor Party and was selected by Time magazine as the year's Asian Hero. Hong also continued appearing regularly on talk shows, notably Yeo Yoo Man Man, on which he guested with his parents and discussed his life since coming out. Acting-wise, Hong starred in the thriller Puzzle (2006) and the stage play A Midsummer Night's Dream (2009).

After his sister's divorce, Hong adopted her two children and changed their last names to his. In 2008, he hosted his own talk show Coming Out, which featured gay issues. Despite Korean society's continuing conservatism, Hong overcame initial public disapproval and gradually gained more mainstream acceptance, especially among the younger generation, in part because of his activism in fighting for LGBT rights. From bit parts and cameos, he now emcees shows on cable television and has a sizeable following on social media.

1976 – Daniel Allen Cox is a Canadian author and screenwriter. Shuck, his debut novel about a New York City hustler, was a Lambda Literary Award and a ReLit Award finalist

Cox is a former Jehovah's Witness and model/actor in gay pornography. From 2008 to 2011, he wrote the column "Fingerprinted" for Capital Xtra! in Ottawa, Ontario. He is openly gay.

Krakow Melt, the second novel by Cox, about Polish pyromaniacs who fight homophobia, was released in 2010 and was excerpted in the US-based national gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate. In 2011, Istanbul-based publisher Altikirkbes acquired Turkish-language rights to the novel for an underground literature imprint featuring Lydia Lunch. The novel was nominated for the ReLit Award, the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Cox's third novel, Basement of Wolves, was released in 2012.

In a cover interview for Xtra!, the author revealed a collaboration with Bruce LaBruce on the screenplay for the director's film, Gerontophilia. Cox's script One Shut Night was named one of five finalists in the 2013 NYC PictureStart Film Festival short screenplay contest, with the announcement of a stage reading directed by Peter Kelley.

Tattoo This Madness In, his novella about LGBT Jehovah’s Witnesses who use Smurf tattoos to rebel against their faith, was nominated for a 2007 Expozine Alternative Press Award.

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