DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975) | Dir: Sidney Lumet | Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) attempt to rob a bank but the police arrive before they can escape, prompting them to take the bank staff as hostages. As he pair face-off with the FBI, the media and public surrounds them. Eventually, the motive for the robbery is revealed: Sonny needs money to pay for his lover Leon’s gender reassignment surgery. Nominated for 6 Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for the brilliant @theofficialchrissarandon as Leon, it won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. While the film represents progressive thinking for its time, it is the humanity and dignity in Chris Sarandon’s performance as Leon that I want to call attention to. Thirty years later, I had the good fortune of directing Chris in LOGGERHEADS. I’ll never forget our first phone call. I had offered him the role of a Southern preacher who had rejected his gay son. Chris said he would do the part under one condition. He did not want to play a one-dimensional stereotype. He wanted to explore the complexity of being someone of faith who is struggling. He created a character whose head and heart are at war, and whose head is winning. As always, he was brilliant. One scene, in particular, breaks my heart every time. It takes place in a barber shop and he watches as a young boy is getting a haircut. In Chris’s eyes, we see the internal war. There’s no dialogue, but there’s grief, regret, nostalgia, warmth, all at once. I marvel at his performance. Today I celebrate Chris Sarandon — a great human being, actor, ally and friend.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 9: Ballot Measure 9
BALLOT MEASURE 9 (1995) | Dir: Heather Lyn MacDonald This film changed my life. A documentary about the fight to stop the anti-gay Measure 9 in Oregon, it won the Audience Award at the @sundanceorg film festival, the Teddy in Berlin and many others. I saw the film at @Newfest in New York at the Public Theater and when it opened at @filmforumnyc, I recruited a small group of my (mostly straight) friends to see it together. It was 1996. I decided I wanted my parents to see this film. They had been struggling with my coming out and this film explained the struggle better than I was able to. One summer afternoon, while I was visiting them in North Carolina, we gathered in the den and watched a VHS copy. Ninety minutes later, they said, “Okay, we get it.” We went into the kitchen, made lunch, and talked about anti-gay legislation, about me, my struggle, their struggle, people in the film, stories of Oregon, Jesse Helms. My Dad revealed that one of his favorite uncles was gay — something even my mother had not known. Watching the film was a tipping point toward their understanding of my life and the larger LGBTQ fight. I immediately wrote Heather a note of thanks, telling her how important her film had been to me and my life. To my surprise, she wrote me back. We met for coffee and 25 years later she is one of my closest friends. Over the years, my parents’ home became known as a safe space for LGBTQ people and parents of queer kids, a place where they could find support and unconditional love. If you ever hear anyone ever say movies can’t change lives, please tell them this story. And see BM9 on @kanopy or @vimeo. Unfortunately, it is more relevant than ever.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 8: The Times of Harvey Milk
THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK (1984) | Dir: Rob Epstein | Few films have affected me as much as this one. It’s definitely in the top ten most-watched films of my life, a film I return to when I am struggling to find hope, which is ironic, since Harvey Milk was assassinated because he was gay. “Hope” seemed to be one of Harvey Milk’s favorite words, something he insisted everyone must provide to the generations that follow. “You’ve got to give them hope,” he said. "Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up.” It’s an extraordinary documentary. The filmmaking is largely archival video and photographs intercut with interviews and voiceover narration from Harvey Fierstein. It’s an example of the “talking head”-style interview at its most effective, with each subject telling a piece of the story, opening themselves up to the filmmakers and allowing the audience access to their most vulnerable moments. I find the interviews with Sally Gearhart, Tom Ammiano and Tory Hartmann (see her clip included here) to be particularly moving. If you have never seen this documentary, I highly recommend, especially if you’re struggling to have hope in these times.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 7: Making Love
MAKING LOVE (1982) | Dir: Arthur Hiller | Widely recognized as the first Hollywood studio film ever made about homosexuality, MAKING LOVE was a major cultural event. I remember seeing articles in magazines and stories on television about it. I was too young to see it in a theater when it came out in 1982, but I remember stealing a glimpse of it when it aired on late-night cable TV. Probably Showtime. Much later, I watched the film from start to finish. MAKING LOVE is about a doctor in a happy marriage to a woman, who discovers he finds himself attracted to another man, one of his patients, and makes the decision to leave his marriage and embrace the homosexuality he has felt for most of his life. The film’s big star was Kate Jackson - the “smart” angel from Charlie’s Angels. She is terrific in the film, as expected. The love scenes between the men (Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean) were daring for their time. There’s a respectful tone to the entire film, not at all sensational, the sexuality treated as matter-of-fact. Years later, I had the great good fortune of meeting the writer, Barry Sandler, who has become a friend over the years, and was able to thank him for being a significant part of the progress LGBTQ stories have made in cinema. The film also spawned a beautiful hit song by Roberta Flack.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 6: Poison
POISON (1991) | Dir: Todd Haynes | My first awareness of Todd Haynes was SUPERSTAR, a film about singer Karen Carpenter but made with Barbie dolls instead of human actors. Sounds like a joke, but trust me, it is far from it and is incredibly moving, ultimately. Anyway, Karen’s estate apparently threatened Haynes with a lawsuit if he didn’t remove the film from circulation and so it became a cult film, duplicated to death on VHS and shared widely. At some point, I had a copy. You can see if online if you dig. But POISON was Todd’s first feature and I saw it at the Anjelika Film Center at Houston at Broadway. There was a lot of press around the film and the burgeoning new “queer” cinema and I remember being so excited to see it, even though I didn’t know what the film was about. POISON interweaves three narratives, each with its own aesthetic language: a tv news-style documentary, a 1960s-style horror, and a more straightforward drama inspired by Jean Genet. It was produced by the great Christine Vachon and released by Zeitgeist Films, who went on to distribute some of the more adventurous and risk-taking films of the last twenty-five years. POISON introduced me to queer cinema and to Genet. There are images from scenes that still haunt me and clearly bothered the most squeamish, including my nemesis, Senator Jesse Helms, who denounced it as pornographic and explicit, of which it is neither. It is sexy, scary, dangerous, provocative and beautiful, though. I still have the poster, framed.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 5: Paris Is Burning
PARIS IS BURNING (1990) | Dir: Jennie Livingston I saw this film for the first time at the Film Forum on Houston Street in New York City with my friend Lili, her brother Oscar and his boyfriend, Johnny. They had already seen it, maybe a couple of times. Oscar and Johnny were the first bona fide long-term gay couple I had ever met. They’d been together for years, since they’d fled North Carolina after college. They loved PARIS IS BURNING, a now-legendary documentary about the drag balls of Harlem, an event in which groups of drag artists compete against other groups of drag artists - their "houses" - mostly people of color, many of them living with HIV and AIDS. It is a breathtaking film, shot in gritty 16mm, low light, with intimate interviews with these artists and their fans about the culture and origins and cultural significance of drag, people I had never met before and would likely never have known about (thanks, Jennie). If you like Madonna’s “Vogue,” watch this film and you’ll see where she stole, er, appropriated it. So much about this film resonates, but there are two things that stand out: it’s about the families we create and about the ways in which marginalized people always know more about the dominant culture than is true in the reverse. I’ll never forget the sold-out audience in the theater, hanging on every word of the subjects featured in the film, and how Oscar and Johnny made sure I understood, as a gay tadpole, how important it was for me to learn about this aspect of queer culture. I’ve tried to pass along some of what I learned to the queer kids behind me.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 4: The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love
THE INCREDIBLY TRUE ADVENTURE OF TWO GIRLS IN LOVE (1995) | Dir: Maria Maggenti I was working in the advertising department at Miramax alongside my friend Jennifer Martinez when I first heard the name “Maria Maggenti.” Her name had overnight become synonymous with success for young women directors, a hero who had graduated from NYU and made her first feature. The film is so wonderfully heartfelt and so beautifully made and it was the first lesbian romance I had seen that felt like a story about people I knew. Its roots were solidly in the romcom genre, but this was different. It wasn’t just that it was two girls, it was about class and ethnicity and culture. It spoke to the time we were living in and had an eye on the future, as well, with an assumption of acceptance. It didn’t pander. I loved it. Later, when I became friends with Maria, I understood even better why the film had such heart and smarts, but also why it was so infused with an urgent sociopolitical flavor. And joy. I hated the poster at first because I wanted it to feature the girls kissing, I wanted it to be as fearless as the title, but as time has passed, I think it is perfect. It has an uplifting, jubilant unpredictability. It looks the way first love feels.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 3: Without You, I'm Nothing
WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING (1990) | Dir: John Boskovich I already knew of Sandra Bernhard (@sandragbernhard) from her brilliant performance in Martin Scorcese’s KING OF COMEDY, where she held her own and more opposite Robert De Niro. This was something entirely different. I had moved to New York City just two weeks after graduating from NC State, too late to have seen Bernhard do the show live during its successful run in the East Village. The filmed version of the show was directed and co-written (with Bernhard) by John Boskovich, an avant garden visual artist. I saw the film at the Anjelica Theater on Houston Street and had never seen anything quite like it. Bernhard created a persona for herself that was alternately brash and tender, irreverent and sincere. It was a critique of celebrity, provincial attitudes about sex, and cultural appropriation. She is so unapologetically herself in the show, something that spoke to me deeply at the time. And her bit about growing up Jewish in a predominantly (and aggressively) Christian world had me doubled over with laughter. But it was a sequence about gay culture, gay panic, and gay pride that resonated the most — and introduced me to the genius of Sylvester. WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING isn’t exactly a gay film, per se, but it’s aggressively queer. I still love it. And her.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 2: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) | Dir: Jim Sharman. The brainchild of Richard O’Brien who blended Busby Berkley-style musical numbers with Sci-Fi, fantasy, horror, comedy and comic book style, ROCKY HORROR had been playing for a decade in midnight shows all over the country by the time I first saw it in a small 2-screen theater in Monroe, North Carolina. It was summer, I was 15, and went to the midnight show with my friend Chris. We were both working a summer job re-finishing high school gym floors. I was surrounded by guys all day who casually tossed out homophobic, sexist and racist comments. Chris and I were the arty guys. Chris played in rock bands and liked Human League and Devo. Despite his queer sensibility, I knew Chris was straight, so talking about my own burgeoning queerness did not seem like a real option. It was Chris’s idea to go see the film and I remember it as my introduction to one branch of Queer Culture. I sat in the theater surrounded by a small group of misfits, dressing up like every day is a Halloween party, together in the dark yelling at the movie screen while Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf delighted us with a rather tame tale of sex, drugs and rock and roll. What the film lacks in subtlety (check out the shape of Rocky’s Pommel horse), it more than makes up for in shameless camp and (dare I say it) heart. When I look back, I remember this as my personal lowest point— the summer of gym floors. THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW saved my life. It said, You’re here, you’re queer, get used to it, at the exact moment I needed to hear it. It was a baby step, but one with fabulous heels.
30 Days of Queer Film - Day 1: My Beautiful Launderette
MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985) | Dir: Stephen Frears. This was the first film I ever saw that showed two men kiss. I rented the VHS one weekend when my parents were out of town and I could watch it in secret. I rewound the tape over and over again as Daniel Day-Lewis pulled Gordon Warnecke into the shadows of a London alley where they had one of the hottest kisses I’ve ever seen onscreen. I replayed that moment in my mind for years and longed for a similar moment in my real life to happen someday.
