HBO’s LGBT History: Mildred Pierce (2011)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we talked about polygamy and homosexuality in Big Love, all the while singing Chloe Sevigny’s praises. This week, we focus on the “genius” Todd Haynes, who's obviously on our minds what with our infatuation with Carol. HBO, as we’ve seen, has always celebrated and supported out gay filmmakers, from Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads, The Celluloid Closet) and Cheryl Dunye (Stranger Inside) to Gus Van Sant (Elephant) and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under). It makes sense that Haynes’s adaptation of Mildred Pierce, led by the incomparable Kate Winslet found a home at the cable network.

We could spend all day gabbing about this languid adaptation but I’ll keep it short and sweet today with 5 Reasons Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce is deliciously gay...

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Women's Pictures - Dee Rees's Bessie

Considering how often Pariah is called "a critical darling," it's disappointingly shocking that it took another 4 years for Dee Rees's next movie. Bessie is an HBO biopic of singer Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, who rose to prominence in the 1920s and died in a car accident in the mid-1930s. When the movie premiered earlier this year, Angelica Jade Bastién wrote a fabulous personal review of it which I highly suggest you read. As Angelica points out, Rees's sophomore effort is a well-directed film that gets a lot right, even though it falls into a lot of the typical biopic pitfalls.

While the plotline of Bessie's meteoric rise, humbling fall, and return to semi-greatness followed a predictable biopic path, what really struck me about this collaboration between Dee Rees and Queen Latifah was how unapologetically individual it was. Unfortunately, fact-based films about black characters, if they are expected to attract a wider (whiter) audience, incorporate white characters to a large degree. Selma and 12 Years A Slave both have white antagonists who gain a lot of screentime - in the case of 12 Years A Slave, it was enough screentime to net Michael Fassbender an Academy Award Nominations.

In Bessie, blackness and queerness dominate...

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HBO’s LGBT History: Big Love (2006-2011)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week (and perhaps you missed it seeing as it was on Thanksgiving Eve), we talked about Diane Lane and RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Willam Belli in Cinema Verite which chronicled the behind-the-scenes drama of the first reality TV show, PBS’s An American Family. This week we look a decidedly new American family, the Henrickson clan of Big Love.

Shows like Big Love are precisely what draws me into the HBO brand. Here is a drama about a polygamous Mormon family man, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) that tackled its subject matter with surprising candor and complexity. It at once aimed to present a deconstruction of the “traditional” American family while all the while rebuffing such an ideological construct in the first place. Bill lives with his three wives: Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin). Those three names alone should you get you interested since, even as the show billed itself around well, Bill, it was the interactions and inner lives of Bill’s three wives which drove much of the show, with Tripplehorn, Sevigny and Goodwin doing great actressing. At its best, the show was a thrilling exploration of non-normative families, particularly insightful when it came to dealing with issues of sexuality within and outside the confines of marriage.

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HBO’s LGBT History: Cinema Verite (2011)

Last week we reminisced about Vito Russo with two related docs: the essential The Celluloid Closet and the 2011 HBO doc Vito. This week we turn from a pivotal figure in silver screen LGBT history to a pivotal one for the small screen. I’m talking, of course, of Lance Loud, who famously came out in An American Family in 1973 when the Loud family became the subject of a PBS docuseries, what many deem to be one of the first reality shows in American TV. Directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, Cinema Verite (watch on HBOGo) follows the behind-the-scenes drama behind that infamous and breakthrough program.

For Americans, as we saw last week, many of the images they saw of homosexuals on movie screens were outright stereotypes. But they really paled in comparison to the images they were getting from the media. In 1967, CBS aired The Homosexuals an episode of CBS Reports. Here’s a sampling of Mike Wallace’s voice-over in the show:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of one–chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits.”

That by 1973 audiences got to see Lance Loud being openly gay and accepted within his family was a huge step forward (even if, given the time period, his homosexuality was used to further vilify the Louds in the press). More... 

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HBO’s LGBT History: The Celluloid Closet (1995) & Vito (2011)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we went a bit #NSFW and looked at six gay sex scenes that ranged from violent/sexy (Oz) to just fully sexy (Looking). This week, we go from the sexually explicit to the (homo)sexually implicit as we turn to The Celluloid Closet and the HBO documentary Vito (Netflix) on the iconic queer film historian, Vito Russo.

“In 100 years of movies, homosexuality has only rarely been depicted on the screen. When it did appear, it was as something to laugh at, or something to pity, or even something to fear. These were fleeting images but they were unforgettable. Hollywood, that great maker of myths taught straight people what to think of gay people. And gay people what to think about themselves. No one escaped its influence.” - Lily Tomlin in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary based on Russo’s work.

As soon as you hear Tomlin’s words, you know you’re in good hands.

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