THEGAYUK

Author: Roger Walker-Dack

  • INTERVIEW: Iris Apfel, Fashion Legends Never Cease

    93-year–old IRIS APFEL is a fashion legend. In an era when even Hollywood stars are slaves to stylists and opinionated editors who want all of us to conform, this New York idiosyncratic doyenne is one of the last truly original, most fabulous dressed women around.

    Her large crammed Manhattan home is packed full of vintage pieces, designer clothing and treasures that she has picked up in thrift stores. She combines chic with cheap. Everything she wears is big, bold and totally stunning, and always topped off with her signature oversized glasses. Married to her centenarian husband Carl for 66 years she has such an enthusiastic energy and pulse for living, which has now been so beautifully captured in an enchanting new documentary portrait by the late Albert Maysles.

    We had THEGAYUSA’s Contributing Editor Roger Walker-Dack put his glad rags on so that he could sit down and talk life and style with this remarkable fashion icon.

    RWD: Your mother once told you to buy a simple black dress, as you would always have something to wear. However it looks from the clothes that you actually wear that you simply ignored her, and in fact you say in the movie that “black is not a style, it’s a uniform.”

    IA: No, I didn’t disagree with my mother, as that was good basic training she gave me. What my mother meant was that I should have a good architectural piece of clothing that didn’t have any embellishment. One that I could wear to the office in the morning, and then go straight out to a black tie affair at night by simply just changing accessories. My mother worshipped at the altar of the accessory.

    RWD: How old were you when your sense of style manifested itself, and when did it evolve into the Iris Apfel look?

    IA: As far as I know it always was there. My family told me that when I was a kid of about four or five years old (but I don’t remember) we were spending the summer at a resort. My mother used to take great pleasure in dressing me every night and she would always concoct an outfit. She had a kind of an orange crate, which I would stand on top of as she dressed me. One particular night all of a sudden people came rushing into the room because I was howling and screaming and carrying on like a banshee as if my mother were going at me with an axe. They were desperate to know what happened. It seems that my mother took a hair ribbon and made a big bow out of it and went to put it in my hair. I kept screaming “it doesn’t match, it doesn’t match”, stamping my feet and carrying on. Now all these years later I realise that Mom was so right as I hate matchy matchy, but in those days I was just horrified. (laughs)

    RWD: What was the most exciting thing about fashion in those very early days when you were still travelling the globe for your interior design business?

    IA: It was so exciting because there was such an enormous amount of creativity. Balenciaga was alive and I had friends in the fashion business who would take me to all the openings in Paris, and it was really so exuberant. Then it was like something new with these bursts of creativity and genius, most of which are all finished now.

    RWD: After the success of the exhibition of your clothes and jewellery at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005 you became an octogenarian starlet, and so many more doors were opened to you, what was the favourite one? Being a Visiting Professor perhaps?

    IA: Actually I called myself a geriatric starlet. They were all very nice as I like doors a lot. I collect doors too. (laughs)

    RWD: Bruce Weber the photographer said that the reason you did this movie was that you thought Albert Maysles was handsome and you had a crush on him! I’m curious to know what the real reason was?

    IA: At first I didn’t want to do it and turned it down flat. Then I had a long talk with Linda Fargo (Senior VP at Bergdorf Goodman) and she said that I must be out of my cotton picking head as people would just drop dead to have Albert Maysles even take a still photograph and he wants to do a documentary of you! I really didn’t think anybody would care about a film about me as I wasn’t very well known and I didn’t have anything to sell. However Albert convinced me, and I’m very glad I did it, as it was a wonderful experience he was a really wonderful guy. We shall all miss him so much.

    RWD: What do you think of the movie now?

    IA: I haven’t actually seen it yet. But if I don’t like it, there is no one to complain to about it now. (laughs)

    RWD: You said in the movie that you believe that it is better to be happy than well dressed.

    IA: Absolutely. I think fashion is just part of my life and if it hadn’t of been fashion then it would have been something else. I was so worried in the film that I would come across as some empty headed fashionista.

    RWD: Well you didn’t.

    IA: Thank God for that because they’re so many empty headed people in the fashion business who take themselves way too seriously and I don’t think I am at all like one of them. To me there are lots more important things in the world than just having the right shoes!

    I think that if you have to work very hard at dressing up and it makes you nervous or uptight, then you won’t look very well because you won’t be comfortable. I think it’s much better to be comfortable and happy than well dressed, don’t you?

    RWD: Absolutely. You value individuality and curiosity so highly

    IA: Oh yes…

    RWD: Then how would you encourage people nowadays to be just that, when things are so mass marketed? 

    IA: First you have to know who you are. That is the most important thing, as if you don’t know who you are you will either get swallowed up or you follow some unsuitable trends and just become a nonentity. It’s not easy to know who you are and it’s very painful and takes a lot of time and that is why a lot of people don’t want to put in the effort. However if you don’t have any individuality and you’re happy just being one of the girls (or boys) be my guest. I’m not the fashion police. I won’t fault you.

    RWD: One of the most touching aspects of your life in the film is your marriage to your husband Carl who celebrated his 100th birthday this year.

    IA: It was sixty-seven years together a couple of weeks ago.

    RWD: Wow! Congratulations. What is your secret to having such a happy relationship?

    IA: Having a sense of humour and giving one another space:  your own space. I’m delighted that gay people now want to get married and I say why not! It’s nobody’s business and I would happily give my blessing.

     

    IRIS is now available to buy on the Amazon store

  • FILM REVIEW | Iris

    “I don’t like pretty!” 93-year-old idiosyncratic fashion maven Iris Apfel remarks, in an enchanting new documentary by Albert Maysles.

    Iris acknowledges that she was never a conventional beauty but that has hardly stopped her pursuing her passion for style and becoming one of the most original and daringly dressed women in New York. As Maysles films her on and off for the past four years he captures not just her remarkable talent for putting the most unexpected and stunning outfits together for her daily ensembles, but he also reveals a captivating quick-witted charmer with an insatiable appetite for living life to the full.

    Iris, married to her centenarian husband Carl for the past 66 years, lives in her mother’s Park Avenue apartment crammed with racks and racks of clothes. These, she explains were bought to be worn and not simply to be collected. She mixes chic with cheap and the results are always fabulous.

    She and Carl ran a very successful interior design business for years and their clients include many of the occupants of The White House over the years, in one charming scene she quickly stops Carl spilling the beans about (how difficult) Jacqueline Kennedy was.

    She was already well-known by New York’s fashion insiders but then in 2005 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted what they thought was a small exhibition of Iris’s clothing and jewellery which turned out to be an unexpected phenomenal success. Doors were suddenly opened to her including commissions to do collections for the Home Shopping Network and becoming a Visiting Professor of Fashion for the University of Texas.

    She was now, in her own words an octogenarian starlet and she put some of this down to the fact the Exhibition had provided the world with much-needed fantasy and glamour. Iris never does anything petite: everything must be big and bold. “Colour is so important: it can raise the dead,” just one of the statements that just trip off her tongue as she spouts forth about her beliefs. What Maysles is quick to spot though is that despite the seemingly incessant flow of opinion, Iris refuses to take any of it seriously.

    Towards the closing scenes of this delightful docu-portrait of the woman Bergdorf Goodman called, “the rare bird of fashion”, Iris claims that her two best traits are curiosity and having a good sense of humour. “I could never be a friend of anyone who wasn’t either”, she added.

    Frankly it’s hard not to like someone as engaging as Iris who comes out with such plums as “my mother worshipped at the altar of the accessory.” By the end of the movie you may not want to actually worship at the altar of Apfel, but you will be very sorely tempted.

    P.S. This sadly was the last work of the great documentarian Albert Maysles who died just days before the movie was screened at the Miami International Film Festival.

  • FILM REVIEW | Tab Hunter Confidential

    ★★★★★ | Tab Hunter Confidential

    Tab Hunter was and still is at the age of 83-years old a stunningly handsome man.

    When he was a teen idol in the 1950s he was the ultimate clean-cut, all-American boy and seemingly butter would not melt in his mouth. He was Warner Brothers Studio’s biggest box office movie star for at least three years of his tenure there. Surprisingly, we learn from this documentary, that Tab’s sexuality didn’t play a part in the ending of his Hollywood career. It was the actor’s own desire to buy himself out of his studio contract. Even though he was a major star, Hunter was extremely unhappy with the lightweight fluffy movies that he was always having to make.

    Tab Hunter Confidential is based on the memoir that Hunter penned with film historian Eddie Muller in 2005. It is a lively account of how this handsome matinee idol, with a rigid set of principles, coped with his dramatic professional and personal life. His sexuality, although hidden from the public in the early days, was no deterrent for studio mogul Jack Warner who never raised the subject. He was simply happy that Hunter was such a moneymaker for him. When on one occasion Hunter’s privacy was sacrificed to save Rock Hudson from being exposed, Warner defended him with a blunt, “Today’s headlines are tomorrow’s toilet paper.”

    With his career fading, Hunter resorted to dinner theatre and whatever work he could get to scrape by until his career got a second wind in the 1980s when he co-starred in Polyester with Divine.

    The most interesting part of the story is Hunter’s romances ranging from ice skater Ronnie Robertson to actor Tony Perkins, the latter who managed to break his heart and steal a role that he had coveted. In an era when homosexuality was not only illegal but could also destroy lives, Hunter resisted taking the well-worn path of other closeted gay men in the public eye who had marriages of convenience. True, he very publicly ‘dated’ many starlets and took part in many photo spreads in fanzines with them, but he resisted the pressure to opt for the easy way out by getting wed.

    Hunter a very devout Catholic explains his dilemma at the time: “If you were with a man you would be sinning, and if you were with a woman you would be lying.”

    He did, as Debbie Reynolds confirmed, make the right choice and he eventually was able to come to terms with his sexuality by accepting the Church’s teaching on love and self-acceptance.

    Some 30 years ago, Hunter aged 53 met a 23-year-old man called Allan Glazer who became his partner, and now after three decades together Glazer is a producer of this documentary which may be a reason why there is little of him in this movie. Since Hunter’s second movie with Divine in 1985 Lust In The Dust, he has settled down to a life away from the spotlight on his ranch with Glazer raising horses.

    Emmy Award winner Jeffrey Schwarz directs the movie, and this is his fourth documentary of a gay icon (Vito, Jack Wrangler and Divine). Schwarz shows a genuine affection for his subjects and the portraits he paints are very insightful and totally riveting. He reintroduces this disarmingly charming man to those of us who have memories of Hunter growing up, and present him to a new generation, who will see him as a role model that they can look up too.

     

    The Tab Hunter DVD is available to buy

  • FILM REVIEW | Boys In Brazil

    ★ | Boys In Brazil

    This painfully unfunny dramedy starts and ends with a group of four closeted gay friends at São Paulo’s Gay Parade, one of the largest in the world. As the Parade ends one of them is gay-bashed and after they beat the thugs off, the four make a pact that by the time of next year’s Parade they will all finally come out of the closet.

    Outrageously camp teenager Mauro has aspirations to be a Drag queen, something his devout evangelical parents are quick to put a stop too once they catch him midstream trying out his lip-synching routine. Their reaction is to drag around their local priest to exorcise the devil out of their son. Mauro’s rather shy best friend Rodrigo just needs a push to hook up with another handsome classmate, and telling his parents that he now has a boyfriend is rather a non-event.

    Mauro’s gay uncle Vicente who was also part of the group is a high-flying businessman who panics when his boss is in town from Paris and insists on having dinner with Vicente and his wife. Vicente’s best girlfriend is dragged into be his beard, but he needn’t have bothered as the boss turns out to be gay too. Who Vicente would have preferred to be dining with is Roger the rather hunky man he helped rescue from the gay bashing incident. Roger, however, is married and about to be a father a second time, and just cannot find the time to reach his part of the pact and come out to his wife. It’s not helped by the fact that his mother-in-law (played by a real-life drag queen!) practically lives with them.

    Then there is the angry and rather annoying self-righteous lesbian blogger who sits in judgement of them all and wants to publicly ‘out’ both Roger and Mauro against their wishes.

    The cliché driven very lame plot is packed full of old-fashioned stereotypes that seem so out of place in contemporary gay cinema. Even the coming-out aspect of the stories are handled so clumsily, that they are difficult to empathise with.

    I saw this one so you wouldn’t have too!

  • Battle Of The Divas, Madonna Goes Head To Head With Gaga

    The music the world’s two biggest music divas both released new videos this week.

    MADONNA with her dizzy frenetic mayhem in ‘Bitch I’m Madonna,’ and then LADY GAGA sitting at on overgrown floral strewn piano at the 2015 European Games Opening Ceremony held in Baku, Azerbaijan plaintively singing her version of John Lennon’s classic ‘Imagine’.

    Madonna has racked up 3 million hits already, whilst Gaga’s video has been watched just under a million times.

    They couldn’t be anymore different if they tried.

    We know which one we love …. but which one do you prefer.

  • Woman Told To “TONE DOWN” Her Gay Garden In “Christian” Area

    The Baltimore Sun has reported that Julie Baker a local resident has started a GoFundMe campaign so she can make her “relentlessly gay” yard even more relentless and more gay.

    The campaign is in response to a note left by one of her neighbours that read:

    “Dear resident of ___ Kenwood Avenue
    Your yard is becoming Relentlessly Gay! Myself and Others in the neighbourhood ask that you Tone it Down. This is a Christian area and there are Children.
    Keep it up and I will be forced to call the police on You!
    Your kind need to have Respect for GOD.”
    Signed A Concerned Home Owner

    Ms. Baker immediately posted this on her Facebook page and then when she launched the Fund wrote,

    “I am a widow and the mother of four children, my youngest in high school and I WILL NOT Relent to Hatred. Instead, I will battle it with whimsy and beauty and laughter and love, wrapped around my home, yard and family!!!”

    By 10:15 Wednesday night Baker had more than doubled her $5,000 fundraising goal to make her home relentlessly gayer.

  • INTERVIEW | Eric Schaeffer

    Once in a while we come across a new small movie that is unafraid to tackle important issues with a very big heart, and Boy Meets Girl is certainly one such film. It is a tender, human, sex-positive romantic comedy that explores what it means to be “real”: to live and love authentically to the truth of one’s heart, regardless of the sex or small town you’re born into. We were so moved by the refreshing and sensitive way that writer/director Eric Schaeffer told this story that stars a transgender girl but is so much more about all the other people in her life who learn to embrace their own identities. It also challenges us to suspend our preconceived views on gender labels and be as open to what happens as these lovelorn kids are.

    We were not the first to give this movie a 5 Star review, but THEGAYUK is the first UK gay publication to sit down with ERIC SHAEFFER to find out more about his remarkable new film, Boy Meets Girl.

    RWD: Where did the story come from?
    ES: It’s dramatically very similar to all my other eight movies. Everyone I know has a very colourful myriad of sexual and emotional feelings and interests that really don’t fit into the narrow boxes that society puts us in, and what I like to write about is breaking out of the confines of these boxes. I came up with this idea of writing about a transgender girl in a small town in the South and challenging the boy meets girl cliché, and so this is, in fact, a broad simplistic kind of romance but with a twist that middle America and the rest of the world can relate.

    I am a straight man and I date women and I have dated transgender women as well in the past. Getting to intimately know some transgender women and also meeting transgendered men gave me the idea of wanting to write about them. The idea that a cisgender straight man who had always dated cisgender women started to be interested in dating transgendered women at a certain point of his life was very interesting to me. Opening up his heart and his eyes to dating these women I thought was a fascinating story especially as it had some real life correlation with me. However, quite honestly, the real driving force was much more abut making a story about people who at the core want to be loved for who they are, as that essentially is what all my films are about.

    Without giving too much away, what surprises so many people who have seen the movie is that Ricky the transgender girl had the smallest arc and the smallest transition emotionally of any of the characters.

    Everyone around her was having much more dramatic profound emotional realisations and that was very exactly what I planned. I wanted the character of Ricky the transgender girl to be ‘normal’ as possible in terms of her life goals, her challenges, her joys, her family and her friends. In a lot of movies, transgender characters are too often being portrayed as people who have all kinds of challenges that are different from cisgender people and that is not really the case in a lot of my own experience and from the research that I did. Most of my trans friends have very wonderful lives that are replete with all the same challenges and joys of cisgender people.

    The other young leads Robbie, Francesca and David are characters who slowly realise that they are being challenged by having the courage to lead lives that they want to live, and with convictions that they feel are right regardless of what society tells them, they should feel and how they should live. This is really what this movie is all about.

    BUY ERIC’S BOOK: I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single – Sane, Slightly Neurotic (But in a Sane Way) Filmmaker into Good Yoga, Bad Reality TV, Too Much Chocolate, and a Little Kinky Sex Seeks Smart, Emotionally Evolved … Oh Hell, At This Point Anyone Who’ll Let Me Watch Football.

    RWD: How did you find the wonderful Michelle Hendley, and how important was it to you that you cast a transgender actress in this part?
    ES: Besides Laverne Cox, there is a very very small list of transgender actors and actresses who are successful enough to be represented by agents, and so they are hard to find. I Googled both ‘transgendered women’ and ‘transgendered actress’, and by a stroke of luck, I found Michelle’s YouTube channel. On all her Vlogs she was talking about her life and her boyfriends and the fashions she liked and she clearly had a performance bone in her body because she was not afraid to be on the net and do these very impressive videos. She looked the part and is young and very pretty and had the right personality. When I got in touch with her she was understandably dubious because she didn’t know my work so she wasn’t sure if my offer of an audition was legit or not. I also had my concerns as she had never acted before and it is a far cry from having the charisma to make a Vlog to being in a feature film. Not only that, she was going to be the star in my movie, which was going to live or die on the performance of her alone. So I rehearsed and auditioned her over Skype and then flew her to NY and had her workshop with other actors. It was a six-month process before I gave her the part and over that time she worked harder and harder and got better and better.

    I had a lot of latitudes because this was an indie movie with a small budget so I could cast anyone I wanted in that part. Had it been a bigger film with a lot more money behind it I would have been answerable to both investors and a studio and I would probably have been under a great deal of pressure to cast a famous cisgender actress in that role. While every actor can portray all sort of characters who they aren’t in real life, no one can argue with the fact that a transgender woman would have the absolute organic profound experience of being transgender. I also thought it an important element of this whole project that I give this unique opportunity to a transgender girl.

    RWD: Was the YouTube plot line in the movie then taken from the Vlogs in her own life?
    ES: No, not at all. I thought it would be unrealistic to have a movie where everything was just so completely fantastic in her life, so I wanted to ground her and show her exposing her more troubled and challenging part of her youth with her making these online videos. I got the idea when I was actually looking around on the Internet trying to find an actress to play the part. I don’t know how I ended up on this video of this young 13-year-old edgy Goth tough-looking girl who was doing this cue card video about being bullied. At the end of this video, she broke into a smile, which was so disarming and completely charming as it made her look so childlike and sweet and adorable. It literally broke my heart when I later found out that this particular girl’s life ended tragically as she either killed herself or was killed.

    Although Ricky’s story has a much happier and positive outcome with such a supportive community, I still wanted people to understand that she didn’t always have a perfect life. So the cue card video sequence is to show that she had struggled with things that we all struggle with in her youth.

    I always wanted it to be very realistic and in fact, it is on the edge of being a fable, but it was also a very crucial element to me to ensure that there is a lot of positivity in the story.

    RWD: You very surprisingly gave her a completely supportive father and a loving kid brother. Why was that important to you?
    ES: Again in the world of wanting to paint this transgender character as being realistic, I thought it important that she have a supportive family life. Like most people, I had suffered from the delusion that is born out of what the media tells us, which portrays transgender women as being victims of a system that denies them the same experiences as cisgender women and not having loving support in their world. In my research, I found that was simply not accurate and many of the transgender women I spoke with came from small communities in the South and were not bullied and had fully supportive families.

    RWD: I read recently that someone wrote about your movies/TV shows: “They all tend to centre around love, or lovin’ and losin’. Usually involving sexual taboos at some point “which are a huge fascination of his”. How true is that, and where does Boy Meets Girl fit into that spectrum as a cursory glance at your resume, this seems quite a leap.
    ES: I don’t think that this is a large leap at all. If one looks at my body of work you would see tremendous similarities with the themes that are running through this film with those in all my other films. However, I don’t mind people thinking it is a change because there are three big departures from my norm. Firstly I chose not to star in this film like I usually do, and secondly, I abandoned my usual setting of New York and placed the action in the deep South, and thirdly I was writing for the first time about people in their early 20s. However quite honestly to me, it dramatically talks about things that I have always talked about.

    RWD: You swept the board at the San Diego Film Festival winning 11 awards, and amongst the many others you have been awarded is the prestigious Iris Prize in Cardiff. Do you think that will help you get the movie beyond gay film festival audiences?
    ES: We opened in New York movie theatres two weeks ago and did extremely well and Wolfe Video who have the world rights are now rolling it out theatrically right across the US before releasing it on VOD/DVD later on.

    RWD: Has it been marketed as a romantic comedy or specifically as an LGBT film?
    ES: Marketing people hate it when I insist that it is simply a movie for people who like good movies. I love the fact that my audiences cut right across a radical age range and sexual orientation and gender race. All my films, especially this one, are heart films, and hearts speak to hearts, and everyone has one. We marketed the film not as straight or LGBT but as a smart edgy sexy romantic comedy.

    RWD: You have a reputation for putting a great deal of your own story in your movies, is that a fair observation?
    ES: People often say that, and I will admit that some of my stuff is autobiographical but quite a lot is not. Wirey Spindell which I wrote, directed and starred in, is totally from my life, and he is a character who I am very closely connected too. However, unlike him, I never made a death pact to kill myself at 30 (laughs).

    The characters that I play in my own movies are very similar to me so in that respect they have the same personality traits, albeit thinly veiled. After Fall Winter, a movie I set in Paris, has a BDSM backdrop and the leading character that I play is interested in a lot of physical and emotional abuse. So much so that some of my friends who know I write about my life expressed their concerned and said, “Eric should we be worried about you?” I told them not to panic; I do have an imagination too (laughs).

    RWD: Let’s talk a little about Eric Schaeffer. You have one of the longest and funniest titles for a blog ever which you parlayed into a book and then a TV reality series I Can’t Believe You Are Single. How do you like living your life out loud and so publicly?
    ES: Whilst I would agree that it would appear that I lead my life very publicly in terms of some of my work, what may come as a total surprise is that I am also fiercely private too. In my book, I am certainly very open about aspects of my life and in my series, you can see me in some very compromising situations. Having said that I am a performer and I am a director and I do understand that there is a bit of me in every character that I play. I did that TV series 7/8 years ago and I really enjoyed it as it was fun to do, but that chapter of my life is definitely closed. I think going forward creatively that less personal projects may be more interesting to me now.

    Our world is very fractured and there is still a tremendous amount of bigotry and suffering borne out of the delusion of separateness and I really want my work to unite people. I think that I’m just a regular old dude but the big difference between me and other old dudes is that I accept who I am and I talk about it.

    RWD: What gives you the most satisfaction?
    ES: I really enjoy creating TV shows and movies and being part of a community of people experiencing a TV show or movie that I have made. I was at a screening of Boy Meets Girl in New York last week and I saw two men who had their heads on each other’s shoulders as they watched the movie. When it ended they looked at each other and had a really sweet love heart kiss, and that brought tears to my eyes. Seeing the bond these two lovers had that in some way my film had helped them create, was just priceless to me. That’s why I do what I do.

    RWD: What’s next for you Eric?
    ES: I’m spending the next 6 months making sure that Boy Meets Girl gets in front of as many people as possible as it can. Unlike bigger budget films where the filmmaker’s job is done once the movie is in the can, the life of an independent filmmaker like me is completely different. It’s just like having a child but whereas well-funded filmmakers have nannies to raise them, as an independent director you are more like a single parent dad. Once I have given my child the best upbringing I can then I will start writing my next project that I have already had ideas for.

  • FILM REVIEW | Boy Meets Girl

    ★★★★★ | Boy Meets Girl

    Eric Schaeffer’s refreshing and enchanting drama about three 20 year-olds looking for love in a small backwater town in Kentucky gently challenges us to suspend our preconceived views on gender labels and be as open to what happens as these lovelorn kids are. Ricky is a confident and determined transgendered young woman who is marking her time working in the local coffee until she is accepted at Fashion School in NY and can get on with the life she dreams of. She’s been best friends with Robby since they were 6 years and he now works as a mechanic at her father’s garage and the two of them are totally inseparable.

    Then one day their world gets shaken up more than a little when Francesca breezes into the coffee shop and within minutes it’s clear that there is a mutual attraction between her and Ricky. Francesca is the spoiled rich kid of a local Politician and is engaged to be married to a Marine presently serving in Afghanistan. When she and Ricky hang out with each other and start to really bond, Ricky breaks the news about her identity to her new friend by text even though they are sitting next to each other at the moment. It sets a tone on how all the intimate moments are so superbly handled in this touching tale of romance.

    Francesca has been ‘saving herself’ for marriage … well, that’s the line she has feeding David her fiance… but soon finds herself in bed with Ricky. She asks after making love if this now makes her gay, to which Ricky simply replies ‘it makes you human.’ The situation soon intensifies when David comes home on leave unexpected and is horrified to discover that his fiance’s new best friend is the transgendered Ricky. It turns out that his homophobia is, however, to do with his own secret past which he shared with Ricky.

    The one person who is even more upset with the two girl’s relationship, which ends before it even gets a chance to really take off, is Robby. Turns out that he now realises that he must come to terms with his own feelings for his best friend, and once he can let go of his preconceived ideas of her gender, he can love her for who she really is.

    Schaeffer’s script handles this all with such refreshing candour which empowers these young people to find it within themselves to accept and value who they are without being hung up on the labels that society insists on doling out. Ricky’s own journey of discovery up to that point was certainly not easy as she had to deal not only with bullying and taunting during her school days but also with the demons of misremembering her late mother’s opinions. She is, however, fortunate to have the unconditional support of her blue-collared father and her younger brother.

    Superb casting also contributed a great deal to the undisputed success of the movie, and the presence of the incredibly talented transgendered actress Michelle Hendley making her film debut as Ricky lifted the whole piece to a different plane. She gave a riveting performance of Ricky as a sassy strong-willed young woman, not immune to the world’s negativity and ignorance about her sexuality, but one who was determined that it wouldn’t stop her being her own true self.

    It’s warm and often very funny and an entertaining, intelligent, sensitive treatment of an oft-misunderstood subject and probably the most enlightening and best movie that I have seen on it so far. It truly deserves the widest audience possible way.

  • Channing Tatum And Matt Bomer Join Gay Parade

    Warner Bros Studios released these pictures today of actors Channing Tatum and openly gay actor Matt Bomer, riding a float in the LA Pride Parade.

  • FILM REVIEW | A Funny Kind Of Love

    ★★★ | A Funny Kind Of Love

    You could be forgiven for thinking from the opening scenes of this new comedy from Australian actor turned director Josh Lawson that you are about to watch a movie that is like a Wikipedia of sexual practices, or even some soft-core pornography.

    Thankfully it is neither of those although Mr Lawson does want us to laugh at the absurdity of fulfilling sexual fantasies, which never ever turn out like you had dreamed and wished for.

    These then are the totally separate stories of five couples and the tenuous link to them is the fact that they all live in the same suburb neighbourhood, and they are all white and middle-class. The first concerns Maeve who confides to Paul her live-in boyfriend that she has a rape fantasy, which he is as reluctant to comply with as he is with proposing marriage. Evie and Dan’s marriage has hit a rocky patchy so the counsellor they consult suggest role-playing to spice things up a bit. The trouble is that Dan gets so into it he quickly forgets why the started doing this as he is now completely obsessed with becoming an actor so he can play dress-up every day.

    Richard and Rowena have been trying to have a baby for so long that sex has become a monotonous chore, for Rowena anyway. That is until her husband gets really bad news and bursts into tears and she suddenly discovers she has dacryphilia (that thankfully is explained on screen). It means that she gets sexually aroused at the sight of tears, which is harmless enough until she finds has to plot to constantly keep Richard sad enough to weep whenever she fancies getting laid. It is an odd condition, but not quite as potentially objectionable as the somnophilia that Paul has when he drugs his nagging wife Maureen so that when she is passed out, he can finally have sex with her.

    The fifth and final … and by far the best scenario, is of a couple of strangers who have not met in person. Monica works as a signing translator for deaf people wanting to make phone calls, and one night Sam calls into use the service. He wants to be connected to a sex line and poor Monica has to be the conduit for the funny and bawdy language that passes between the ‘working girl’ and Sam a cute young graphic novelist. Despite its set up it has the most tenderness of all of the scenarios because of the very real chemistry between both the caller and the operator, and it is such a genuine connection.

    There is one other tenuous link between this group of vignettes in the shape of a new neighbour who is going around introducing himself. Whilst handing over welcoming gifts he slips into the conversation that fact that he is a registered sex offender, but every household he calls on is so wrapped up in their own problems that the last part simply doesn’t sink in. Just when you think he may get back to his old ways, Lawson finishes him off. We had expected something fatal to happen because of the original title of the movie had been The Little Death and he is one of the ‘little deaths’.

    The movie ends up being more bizarre than bawdy although it does heavily on the basic assumption that many people who find sex funny will find this movie comical too. The troubles are that the laughs are rather intermittent and some regarding the whole concept of non-consensual intercourse are bordering on being offensive and in extremely bad taste.

    As well as giving himself a plum part (Paul) Lawson does pepper the piece with an extremely talented cast of well-known Australian actors. Particular mention to the pitch performances from TJ Power and newcomer Erin James as Sam and Monica. By placing their story last in the proceedings it did at least mean the movie ends on a much higher note than the one it started on.

  • FILM REVIEW | Angel With Tethered Wings

    It seems like Steven Vasquez the director/writer/cinematographer/editor wants to corner the market in low-budget gay horror mystery movies the rate he is turning them out these days.

    This new one like his last recent one (Errodity) is essentially another piece of soft-core pornography, but this time with an extended and tangled plot, and where the script is as flaccid as the penises and the only thing stiff is the acting.

    It’s billed as a ‘back-from-the-grave revenge flick’, which is in three parts and is the story about a pair of gay twins, and their brother. I think. Anyway, there is a bad twin who is a callous producer of twink porn who owes the mysterious Carmine an awful lot of money that he plans to replay when a geeky Texan coughs up big time to have sex with the main porn star. The money disappears after the Texan has had his end away, and the rest of the movie is spent chasing the money and the Twink too.

    It’s not all played out chronologically so the rather lame story is not that easy to follow, and I wouldn’t be giving too much away by saying that soon after the Twink and his brother (!) come back as vampires, most of the cast get shot one way or another. Now that the Twink is dead he very sadly misses his boyfriend although they dated for just two days. However, the fact that he is played by a real (and hot) porn star Addison Graham makes that totally understandable. He actually puts in a very convincing performance even when he is fully clothed.

    Nearly everyone at one time or another gets completely naked and there are lots of full frontals and also some very noisy un-erotic simulated sex scenes, once even played out to some church lady singing ‘Ave Maria’.

    Making ambitious low budget gay movies like this is not easy and through sheer lack of resources often the script and the acting suffers. In this instance, it was both, and maybe if Vasquez hadn’t been trying to do everything behind the camera himself he would spot that too.

    If you are a fan of gay zombie B Movies then you may want to even try this, as there are not many others in this genre. If you are a fan of Mr Graham and want to literally see more of him (!) then you may want to check out some the steamy movies he stars in for Michael Lucas’s Studio.
    On Dvd/VOD July 13th from TLA