“What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy. And if it takes me a while to pull myself together, and if I can smoke a little grass before I get nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own.”

The cutting words of The Boys In The Band’s sharp-tongued Harold aren’t just one of the most hyper-aware self-assessments in the history of filmdom — they’re a fitting tagline for a landmark movie that’s as many simultaneous things as Harold, its birthday boy is.

At once a social document, wry sexploitation flick, hissing bitchfest, repository for immortal camp dialogue, midnight movie, urban character study, bleak outsider period piece, and parlor drama run amuck, The Boys In The Band has managed to endear and repel, engage and repulse, disarm and dismay its viewers in equal measure, and as it nears the big 4-0, it’s apt that as the film reaches midlife crisis time, its target audience finds itself at a heady vantage point of not only looking back at a turbulent past, but looking forward to as precarious a future.

By now, scribe Mart Crowley’s watershed 1968 Off-Broadway production that inspired the film has become a part of New York history and Big Apple mythology beyond. (more…)

On June 10, 2006, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland appeared on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen.

Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice. (more…)

Because the ’50s were so much more than tailfins and pointy bras.

BUT WAIT! — THERE’S MORE! (more…)

Twelve years before the Stonewall riots blew the gay rights movement open, an unsung hero led the charge.

Franklin Kameny (left), a World War II veteran, was fired from a U.S. Civil Service job in 1957 on suspicion that he was a homosexual. He refused to capitulate and refused to be ashamed of his sexual orientation, taking the case to the courts, suffering loss after loss. He branched out to take on the American Psychiatric Association to have homosexuality removed from its list of disorders, working with the Mattachine Society, the leading gay rights group of the time. He fought for nearly a decade before the APA reversed its position. In 1971 he ran for Washington D.C.’s nonvoting congressional delegate, hoping to be the first openly gay candidate to win public office, and lost, two years before Harvey Milk’s first defeat as a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a position Milk finally won in 1977.

How times have changed since then. Kameny has gone from a peculiar dissident to a celebrated hero of the LGBT rights movement, and his home in Washington has been declared a D.C. historic landmark. He’s being honored this year at the Pride celebration in Washington D.C., at the age of 84, for his work. Most of the institutions Kameny took on have now been reformed in favor of LGBT rights, and the terms and arguments fought during that first push have been enriched with layers upon layers of queer liberation thought.

But it was the first leaders and activists who had to push the hardest, who struggled to maintain dignity against seemingly insurmountable odds. They fought battles they knew they were going to lose, on issues yet unclear if there could ever be a victory.

Fifty years ago, had the Internet existed, websites like this one would have been promptly shut down as obscenity. So it seems fitting to take a moment now to honor Kameny, who took one of our community’s first steps toward freedom.

Two convicts make love though a hole in the wall, a hole so tiny that the only object that can pass through it is a straw and the only love that can be made is one convict blowing smoke into the other’s mouth.

This is the most famous scene in the dank and languid Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love), an underground film made in the year 1950 — an antique prehistoric moment before the emergence of a forthright gay sensibility — by Jean Genet, France’s most acclaimed thief, pornographer and poet of perversity. (You can watch the complete 25-minute film below, after the break.)

And when I say perversity, I’m not being flip or using an egregious code word for “homosexual” favored by haters of gay people. No, Genet had — or perhaps, for the sake of his art, for the “beauty of the gesture,” affected to have — a most Satanic taste for true perversity: he once wrote that the greatest act of love was for one lover to betray the other to the Gestapo, while the accused looked on. (more…)

There’s something about those bi guys that burns in our minds whenever we happen to know one.

To be more precise, there’s something about the “bi-curious” male. He claims — truthfully or not — to prefer women, to be, as he might call himself, a “regular dude,” except that if the case is compelling enough he might experiment with a guy.

Our perspectives on him will diverge wildly. Some find him deliciously elusive and have an overwhelming curiosity for him. Others consider him the holy grail of sexual adventure.

I think that most who have been in the gay community for a while meet him with the assumption that he’s just half in the closet or putting on an act. The “something about him” we sense can be distrust or even disdain. Surely, many surmise, he’s a full-blown queer, with the as much inclination for a male partner as any raging queen. He’s just happened to learn that for some reason, when it comes to finding a sexual partner, a lot of gay men find the “questioning straight dude” or “gay first-timer” irresistible.

Which begs the question: why do we find that so irresistible? What’s appealing about the idea of a clearly insecure, unprepared and inexperienced man?

As an aside, I’m not here to claim male bisexuality is not real, and to be fair to my friends who have loved both genders and bisexual guys who visit this site, I’ll say I know real male bisexuality does exist.

Many in the gay community resist acknowledging a real bisexual man, because we’ve encountered the type of gay guy who claims to be bisexual thinking it makes him somehow better than the rest of us. We come away, reasonably, offended by his subtle insistence that we’re faggier or weaker or more “limited” for liking men exclusively.

We can’t let our experience with those men lead to disrespect for real people, those guys who are, indeed, bisexual because of the exact biological impetus that makes others gay or straight.

Nor can we approach any particular self-identified bisexual man drawing initial uninformed conclusions that he’s being disingenuous about his orientation just because we know others are. To make those assumptions is the definition of prejudice. (more…)

Porn, as we scholars of the form know, takes place in an alternate universe too lopsided, too abundantly endowed, too strangely convenient to ever be described as parallel.

Pizza boys arrive with hardons. Doctors are as fit as musclemen and when they ask you to drop your pants, they drop theirs.

Here the locker rooms are oddly silent and empty … empty, empty empty — except for HIM! HIM has, of all things, the locker right above yours and a painfully erect whopper that keeps bumping into your face.

Welcome to Pornville. That Land That Never Was and yet can never die thanks to those old eight-millimeter reels that laid down the rules and regulations for all time. Rules like …

Well, finding a stranger asleep in your barn (your barn?) He is naked, of course, totally — except for one odd little hayseedy type thing: he’s wearing a studded cockring. That and giganzo chrome rings through his nipples, cockhead and perineum.

This, you think, must cause a sensation when Hayseed goes through the machines at the airport. But, of course, there aren’t any airports in Pornville. Only barns, locker rooms and embarrassingly queer-looking bedrooms decorated to within an inch of their silly High-Auntie lives. (And boy, do we have the evidence. See our brother site Lurid Digs.) (more…)

Once a week when I was a teenager, my friends and I would drive to a gay nightclub downtown. Thursday nights were alcohol-free and 16 was the age of entry. Since there were only a handful of openly gay students at each of our high schools, if even that, the only way we knew to connect with other young gay people was over the Internet and in that club.

Inside was a sea of dancing skinny, hairless teenage boys from the suburbs who looked even younger than they really were, ringed by a flock of straight girls we brought with us, who pole-danced against our thighs. The lesbians gathered in their own clusters to the side. You could hear the bassy music from outside on the patio and cigarette smoke choked the air just before indoor smoking bans hit major cities. Some of the boys would take their shirts off and sag their pants low enough that you could tell their pubes were shaved. The rest of us would sit at the tables smoking, or in my case, take occasional drags from friends’ cigarettes and talk about people who passed by.

Almost everyone in the club was under the age of 20, but there were always a couple of guys aged 27 or so in the mix, and occasionally we’d see a socially-awkward man in his 30s or 40s gawking at the young kids as if to memorize every face. We thought those guys were creepy, and talked shit about them as we talked shit about the teenage boys who were their friends. (more…)