Last year, author Garth Greenwell suggested that Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life could be the great gay novel that contemporary culture was waiting for. A few months later, Greenwell produced his own contender for that title when his acclaimed What Belongs To Us was released. Around the same time, Alexander Chee’s…
Watching The Purge: Election Year is like listening to an explanation of American politics from your high-school aged brother who goes to class sometimes. The third entry in James DeMonaco’s cheap and profitable horror franchise centered around an annual 12-hour nighttime period in which Americans are permitted to…
In late 2014, professional boxer Yusaf Mack did something no one else in his sport, active or retired, had ever done: He performed in porn. Gay porn. The scene he shot as “Philly” with DawgPoundUSA existed quietly on the internet for about 10 months, amazingly, until word of the video began to circulate around his…
Upon meeting Nicolas Winding Refn in the NOMO SOHO suite where he was fielding interviews earlier this week I told him I was weirdly invested in his existential state. “Oh cool,” replied the director of 2011's universally acclaimed Drive.
Last year, a man named Bayna El-Amin smashed a chair over the head of another man named Jonathan Snipes at a Chelsea Dallas BBQ. Snipes, who is gay, initially portrayed the attack to DNAInfo as bias-related and unprovoked. Because El-Amin fled the scene and wasn’t arrested until over a month later, the public didn’t…
The Sundance sensation Swiss Army Man essentially wonders what Cast Away would have been like if Wilson weren’t a volleyball but a corpse named Manny (played by Daniel Radcliffe) whose bodily functions like farting and boners helped our stranded protagonist Hank find his way home (the farts propel Manny over ocean…
For over 20 years, filmmaker Todd Solondz has confronted audiences and what they hold true with brutal satires of human interaction and the politeness that convolutes it. His subject matter has probed, often with a sense of humor, taboos like child abuse, rape, and exploitation. His 1998 movie Happiness offered a…
The one thing that Dory remembers is that she can’t remember. During a flashback in Finding Dory, Pixar’s follow-up to 2003's Finding Nemo, we discover it was always this way, via a baby Dory with thick eyelids and red eyes that made her look like the cutest widdle stonder who ever took bong rips through gills. “I…
The It Gets Better Project is maybe Dan Savage’s most ingenious creation, and that’s really saying something given that I’m referring to the man who made Rick Santorum’s last name synonymous with a frothy mix of lube and fecal matter. The initiative Savage formulated in 2010 with his husband Terry Miller in the wake…
It all started with a video of a guy wearing bright colored athletic gear in a sparse room laughing uncontrollably with a bunch of other guys on top of him. New Zealand journalist David Farrier received a tip about “Competitive Endurance Tickling” and started looking into it and tweeting about it. Farrier reached out…
As we continue to mourn for Orlando, it’s important to not lose sight of homophobia’s status as a global problem. Offering some depressing perspective on that note is a story out of Uganda—which remains a horrific place for LGBT people and where homosexual activity is illegal— via KuchuTimes, “Africa’s first…
Last night, out journalist Owen Jones found himself surrounded by people who disagreed when he claimed, “At the end of the day, [the Pulse shooting] was a homophobic hate crime, as well as terrorism.” This happened on Sky News, which airs in the UK.
Before Sunday morning, the event that had the grave distinction of being the largest massacre of gay people in American history occurred June 24, 1973, at the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans. A fire, which a police and fire investigation eventually deemed arson, killed 32 people during a Sunday beer blast after a…
Screenwriter and director of the 2011 PBS film Woody Allen: A Documentary Robert B. Weide published a widely circulated Daily Beast piece “The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast” in 2014. The piece was ostensibly interrogative though some interpreted it as dog whistling sympathy for Allen. In it, Weide responded to…
As a troll, actress/Fox News professional conservative Stacey Dash (Clueless) probably knows a thing or two about peeing outside: under bridges, into fountains, in bushes. So since we’re dealing with an expert, it’s important to listen when she advises a group to void their waste in public. In this case, said group is…
A throat is slit, heads are lopped off, buildings crumble, bodies dissolve, Wolverine’s metal claws plunge into multiple living bodies, and little more than a spritz of blood is shed during the two-and-a-half-hour running time of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse. The latest entry in 20th Century Fox’s 16-year-old…
From 1985 to 2007, Will Allen was part of the Buddhafield—an initially Los Angeles-based “spiritual community” led by one Jaime Gomez aka James Gomez aka Michel Rostand aka Andreas aka Reyji (aka Dirk, the name he used in the porn he shot for Falcon in the ‘70s). Mostly, though, he was referred to as “the Teacher.”…
It’s the right’s turn to top in the flip-fucking session that is the struggle for LGBT rights in the United States. The New York Times reports that officials in 11 states—Maine, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin—have sued the federal government over …
An extraordinary thing fell into the laps of filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg as they documented Anthony Weiner’s 2013 bid for New York City mayor: Weiner’s dick. For about six weeks, Kriegman and Steinberg filmed Weiner’s promising attempt at public redemption after his 2011 sexting scandal caused him to…
Amanda Lauren’s tagline on her website reads “I write things that become a thing,” and boy does she! This week two pieces of hers received an influx of attention and response—a Your Tango essay called “Staying Hot For My Husband Is ESSENTIAL To A Successful Marriage” and a now-deleted xoJane essay titled “My Former…
