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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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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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen'

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week a new documentary about transgender representation on screen, streaming on Netflix.

By Glenn Dunks

The Celluloid Closet casts a long shadow over queer cinema in the 25 years since its release when it became an arthouse box office and Emmy-nominated sensation. That film by Rob Epstein (a two-time Oscar winner) and Jeffrey Friedman opened the world of film to new textural readings that many LGBTIQ viewers had known and talked about for years but remained largely quiet in the mainstream while traversing through to the then budding space that queer filmmakers and stories had carved by 1995. And for those young enough to come to the film as a budding LGBTIQ cinephile, it made for a hell of an introduction to movies.

There are always going to be gaps in a film like The Celluloid Closet and the new Netflix documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen from director Sam Feder attempts to fill them. All that and add a quarter of a century of cultural and societal changes on top... 

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Pride Month Doc Corner: The newly restored 'Gay U.S.A.'

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week we are looking at a classic that has been recently restored by the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project.

By Glenn Dunks

Pre-AIDS accounts of queer life and pride that aren’t about the Stonewall riots are rare. Understandably, the violent anti-police uprising of 1969 by (primarily, at least at first) drag queens, lesbians and transgender individuals was the most significant moment in the public’s understanding of LGBTIQ people until the epidemic (gosh, a lot of these things sound familiar, don't they?). But while there is a lot to be found about the queer experience through films that interrogate both Stonewall and AIDS, just as vital to the fabric are films like Gay USA from 1977.

Directed by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., this compendium of gay pride wraps itself in a rainbow flag of its own making and sets out to celebrate the experience of nation-wide parades and marches that for many were once an unimaginable dream. 

Bressan, who died of AIDS in 1987 after his glorious fictional feature Buddies, assembled camera crews across the country to capture the (pun intended) gaiety of pride when the future looked hopeful.

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Curio: Nomi & Cristal 4ever

Curio is our fan art series, curated by Nathaniel R

I found myself seething with jealousy yesterday when Joey from Awards Daily received a Nomi Malone pin (left) in celebration of the release of the documentary You Don't Nomi (now available on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play and we'll have an interview about that movie soon.)

Today on the inimitable Gina Gershon's birthday,  I am more zen about the injustices of being denied Showgirls swag. Life is not fair. And I'm getting too old for that whorey look, anyway.

Nevertheless I was one of the original champions* of the movie's trash brilliance, and I am programmed to celebrate it every time it comes back around to public attention. After the jump some tees, crafts, and artwork honoring the iconic characters from that classic film...

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