#in their version the film was made in 1983

[silentvoidtreeshop]

asked my brother if he'd seen goncharov (1973) and he looked at me and grabbed this beanie that hes had for 2 years that ive seen but never read the tag on it and

turns out he and his friends got matching beanies and made lore a full TWO YEARS ago

[chernobog13]

A diorama featuring the William Stout-designed version of Godzilla for the never made 1983 film Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3D.

[canmom]

Animation Night 130: Hayao Miyazaki’s Aeroplane Movies

Oh that Hayao Miyazaki! We sure have a slightly complicated relationship to him here on Animation Night!

See for example...

Animation Night 70, where I talk about his early career and years as a Toei union man, up to the founding of Ghibli;

Animation Night 100 where I tell you about one of my favourite ever films Mononoke-Hime;

Animation Night 111 where we look at the fascinating My Neighbour Totoro-Grave of the Fireflies double bill of 1988.

Tonight, we’re going to look at two films, Porco Rosso and the controversial The Wind Rises, which indicate his particular arc through life in, honestly, a rather sad way. Putting them alongside each other to see what we learn...

If there’s one thing old Hayao loves, it is aeroplanes - particularly planes from the early-mid 20th century. No surprise, really: his dad Katsuji Miyazaki ran a company Miyazaki Airplane, which manufactured parts for world war II aeroplanes such as the infamous Zero fighter plane. (Put a pin in that one!) Despite working to arm the Imperial Japanese military, Katsuji was able to get out of actually serving in the war by telling his commanding officer that he didn’t want to fight when he had a wife and kid, which somehow got him discharged with just a lecture.

The young Hayao, born 1941, was therefore surrounded by planes, which were the source of his family’s comfort. He spent his earliest years fleeing from American air raids, suffering from digestive problems, and watching his stern, intellectual mother Yoshiko suffering from spinal tuberculosis (though she ultimately made it to 1983, at age 72). At school in the 50s, he took an interest in manga - which in those days naturally meant Osamu Tezuka; he also went to see drama films with Katsuji such as Meshi (1951).

In ‘58, he saw Toei’s Legend of the White Snake (白蛇伝 Hakujaden), notable as the first colour anime film, sneaking out from studying for his exams. The film had a profound effect on him. In Starting Point, he writes that he fell in love with the film’s heroine Bai-Niang, and yet gradually started to imagine how he might have done the film differently to better show the secondary characters.

Hayao went to university to study political economy with a focus on ‘Japanese Industrial Theory’, and at the same time, started drawing in earnest, cranking out thousands of pages of manga and spending a lot of time sketching and chatting politics with his middle school art teacher. The 60s and 70s were a high point of left-wing activity in Japan, the time of the Japanese New Left and the Anpo protests against the US-Japan security treaty (c.f. Toku Tuesday 33 on Nagisa Ōshima for a truly fascinating filmmaker who rose to prominence at this time!) So Miyazaki fairly naturally became a Marxist, and stayed such as he got his start working in animation, which I’ve covered in other posts.

So at this point perhaps we can see the curious contradiction that sits in so much of Miyazaki’s work: he genuinely loves aeroplanes and other kinds of military hardware on a kind of aesthetic level, and yet this sits pretty curiously against a worldview that went from Marxist to environmentalist and has no love of war or nationalism.

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at a few of Miyazaki’s early depictions of planes. First would be his work on episode 21 of Moomin (1969), by TMS entertainment. On this infamous episode, Miyazaki’s senpai Yasuo Otsuka called in his protégé to handle of all things a battle scene with planes and tanks - one which infuriated Tove Jansson, already dissatisfied with the tone of the adaptation, to the point that she pulled the show out of TMS Entertainment and A-Pro’s hands and gave it to Tezuka’s rival studio Mushi Pro instead.

(I can’t find any embeddable version, but I did get my hands on this episode eventually! Lain bless soulseek.)

This did not deter Miyazaki at all. In his work on ‘Green Jacket’ Lupin III Part I, which he co-directed with Takahata and Masaaki Ōsumi as well as animating several scenes, we start to see his love of mechanical detail shine through once more. Miyazaki’s plane obsession would shine through even more strongly with his direction of two episodes of ‘red jacket’ Lupin III Part II (1980), under the pen name “Tsutomu Teruki”, directing animators like the spectacular Kazuhide Tomonaga as @kbnet​ documents here. By that point his style had matured - the character designs and motion feel like something drawn in Ghibli’s early years, and the plane backgrounds are astonishingly dense with detail. The Castle of Cagliostro is by comparison relatively light on aeroplanes, but truly elevates Lupin’s car to a character - not to mention the film’s ridiculously elaborate finale where the characters battle through an enormous system of gears.

In between these two Lupin jackets came Future Boy Conan, where we start to see Miyazaki find more things to say about planes than “damn cool!”; a full of wonderful plane adventures, yet they also represent the sinister forces of industrialism which destroyed the world once and threaten to do it again.

In an essay from 1979 that opens the collection Starting Point, Miyazaki remarks on the qualities needed to animate a plane on Conan, giving a sense of his philosophy around animated machines - and his perfectionism:

Quite a few of toda’s younger animators plunged directly into this line of work because they were fans. But if I were to ask them to draw a picture of what they think a chaika (a flying boat in Future Boy Conan) would look like in flight, they would only be able to imagine what they had previously seen on past TV anime shows. And I wouldn’t be able to use their work as a result.

To draw a chaika flying in a truly original fashion, you would need to have read at least one book on the history of flying, and then be able to use your imagination to augment what you have read.

This is followed by an anecdote about Russian pilot, and builder of the first four-engine biplane, Igor Sikorsky - the man who for Miyazaki “symbolises the way men really fly”.

Miyazaki of 1979 seemed to have a lot on his mind about the relationship of humans to machines. He criticises the mecha shows of the time for a lack of focus on how the character creates and maintains the machine: “the protagonist should struggle to build his own machine, he should fix it when it breaks down, and he should have to operate it himself”. And true to form, when Miyazaki’s films portray machines, there is as much loving depiction of the maintenance as the actual machines in flight.

We’ll fast forward now, since I talked quite a bit about The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky back on AN 70, and Totoro back on AN 111. I haven’t covered Kiki’s Delivery Service yet, although you can trust we will before too long! No, the first film of interest to us tonight is a bit of an oddball in the Ghibli oeuvre; well known to fans of the studio but not quite as much of a household name. That’s Miyazaki’s flying pig movie, Porco Rosso (紅の豚 Kurei no Buta).

^ here’s your obligatory Yoshinori Kanada-animated background animation scene!

Porco Rosso is Miyazaki’s first movie to not just feature planes, but be truly overwhelmingly about planes. Set in a vaguely Mediterranean world, it expresses Miyazaki’s nostalgia for a lost era of flying before he was born, and yet it’s also tinged with the impending horror of the second world war and the recognition that the planes that Miyazaki loves so much are above all weapons.

Unlike many of Miyazaki’s movies, it centres on mostly adult characters and its narrative arc doesn’t really move to any sort of definite resolution; it’s more a portrait of the era, or rather, Miyazaki’s fantastical imagination of the era, in which there can be sky pirate families flying with dozens of children and, of course, a man can get transformed into a pig. The central character of the film, the eponymous Porco Rosso (so called because he’s a pig (porco) that flies a red (rosso) aeroplane), is an outcast due to his pig curse, but also perhaps because he insists on flying for himself rather than for the Italian military, a stance that is already becoming obsolete.

So Porco ends up adopting a young aircraft engineer - a bishōjo character in the spirit of The Castle of Cagliostro - who is eager to see the world. The largest conflict in the film is Porco butting heads with an arrogant American pilot over the affections of Gina, a woman who runs a bar for pilots - yet the two are clearly more similar than different.

By this point Studio Ghibli is well-established, and Miyazaki can take his pick from some of the best animators in the entire industry. So we see not just Yoshinori Kanada, but also sakuga aces Mitsuo Iso(!!!) and Shinya Ohira(!!!), and with Ghibli money they can truly go all-out. All that attention to mechanical detail, the buliding of machines, is there. Events like the testing of an aeroplane engine are accompanied by incredibly complex multi-layered shots that only a drawing demon like Ohira could accomplish. Only someone whose grasp of 3D form is as precise as Mitsuo Iso could animate some of these shots of subtle wobbles in the pre-CGI era. And on top of that, the colour design of Michyo Yasuda is there in all its beauty, Joe Hisaishi truly came into his own with a score as wistful and nostalgic as such a film demands; it’s an incredibly accomplished work of animation. 

But, planes though.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes - one which unites the two films we’re going to see tonight - sees Porco fly up high into the sky to a kind of flying graveyard of aeroplane pilots. It’s here we especially see the ambivalence that obsesses Miyazaki: he finds aeroplanes one of the most beautiful things in the world, idolises their pilots, and yet of course this period of aviation was an incredibly dangerous one, and moreover the aeroplane development was catalysed by war and soon would lead to a level of destruction never seen before in human history with the bombing campaigns of the second world war.

It would be natural to imagine that the workshop where Porco recruits Fio may in some way resemble the workshop run by Miyazaki’s parents - in spirit, as he imagines it, if not in detail. Like Miyazaki Airplane, this workshop in Italy cannot be doing anything but supplying aeroplanes to Mussolini, and indeed we see Porco utter one of the most quoted lines in the film when he tells his old air force buddy “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.” even though this leaves him essentially a fugitive, on his own with a plane and a girl (like half his age I guess?).

^ This swarm of tadpole-like children was animated by Masashi Ando.

If you actually read Miyazaki’s comments about his dad, it seems a little different. Far from being lovingly crafted, Miyazaki writes, Katsuji would make defective parts and bribe officials to look the other way. He would go to nightclubs right into his 70s and ask Hayao if he’d started smoking yet.

At the time this film came out, Hayao Miyazaki’s father Katsuji would die only a couple of years later, in 1993. We can find a short piece that Hayao wrote about it in Starting Point (page 208-209, My Old Man’s Back):

...And after the war, he had no sense of guilt about having been involved in the military arms industry or having produced defective parts. In effect, for him war was something that only idiots engaged in. If we were going to war anyway, he was going to make money off of it. He had absolutely no interest in just causes or the fate of the state. For him the only concern was how his family would survive.

(...)

When he died two years ago, those of us who gathered together agreed that he had never once said anything particularly lofty or inspiring. If I have one regret, it is that I never discussed things seriously with my old man. From the time I was young, I always looked at him as a negative example. But it seems, after all, that I am like him. I have inherited my old man’s anarchistic feelings and his lack of concern about embracing contradictions.

So the actual reality of aeroplanes around Miyazaki had little to do with the romantic images we see in his films. But that ‘lack of concern about embracing contradictions’ seems important...

In 2013, 20 years after Katsuji’s death, Miyazaki would direct a new film, The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu, lit. The Wind Has Written) - to date, his last film, although of course like clockwork he’s since come out of retirement to work on another one. Ostensibly, this film is a biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the inventor of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane so vital to the Imperial Japanese war machine.

However, if you look into the details, you soon realise that the story present in the film - particularly its central element of Jiro love interest and eventual wife Naoko Satomi - is a complete fiction. Jiro Horikoshi did marry and eventually had five children, but there is very little information about them, even in Horikoshi’s own autobiography. An article comparing the film against it remarks...

The Story of the Zero Fighter is 80% plane design ideas, measurements and stories surrounding Jiro’s career. There’s so much focus on the construction of the planes there’s a measly 20% left for autobiographical material.

According to that article, Horikoshi’s autobiography describes his initial thrill at reports of the Zero’s success in the invasion of China, then later, the psychological impact of a bomb striking nearby and his gradual realisation of what a war actually meant. It’s an arc towards increasing horror at the measures the Japanese Empire was taking to win the war with it, particularly the announcement of the Kamikaze suicide-bomber tactic:

Jiro was approached by the press to write a short essay on the Kamikaze, but he declined. He found it too emotionally difficult to think when he looked at photographs of smiling pilots boarding Zero’s, knowing they were doomed to death. Sobbing, the only sentiment that encouraged him to put pen to paper was dedicating his writings to the families who had lost their loved ones in the war. In the haunted depths of his mind he wondered why Japan had not just given up the war, and why they had gone to such measures with the Zero’s.

Very little of this arc makes it into The Wind Rises. Nationalism is glimpsed only at the margins. In one trip to Weimar Germany, Horikoshi witnesses a Jewish man being pursued; later, he meats a privately anti-Nazi German man at the hospital who talks briefly about how foolish nationalism will make a country ‘blow up’, and his final oblique conversation with the dream-ghost of his idol, Italian aircraft engineer Giovanni Cabroni, about what it means to build planes when they will be tragically be destroyed.

Instead, we find Miyazaki draw in a different source for the primary character arc of this movie: a novel by Tatsuo Hori that also has the title 風立ちぬ Kaze Tachinu. Set in a sanitarium much like the one in which Horikoshi spends the latter half of the film, it tells the story of the relationship between a nameless protagonist and a woman dying of tuberculosis.

It seems an odd connection at a glance: why would you take this seemingly entirely unrelated novel and apply it to an actual historical person? To me, the most plausible answer is that this isn’t really a film about Jiro Horikoshi. Because recall that, of Miyazaki’s parents, his mother also had spinal tuberculosis, and his dad also made planes for the war. Yet, the Horikoshi of this film hardly resembles Katsuji Miyazaki either, who we’ve seen was far from a workaholic like the film’s Jori Horikoshi. Instead, this would better resemble Hayao himself. So instead, it seems to be using this historical setting as a kind of place to explore Miyazaki’s feelings about his parents, his own craft in animation (wedded to the technical industrial world as it is)...

Inevitably that’s a pretty fraught thing to do! More so than any of Miyazaki’s other films, the film sparked a lot of controversy, mostly for how it handles the topic of the war. You could argue that like, OK, do you need a movie to moralistically lecture you on how invading most of Asia was bad? Must it rub our faces in the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy to be a worthwhile movie?

One answer is that with the amount of modern nationalism and historical revisionism out there, it might not go amiss for national hero Hayao Miyazaki to take a stand there! But honestly it’s more that, with such subject matter, seems to go out of its way to avoid showing what the Zero was actually used for. The main tragedy, as far as Horikoshi was concerned, seems to be that so many pilots of this beautiful aeroplane die; that his pursuit of engineering beauty was corrupted by worldly matters like a war.

Which isn’t necessarily a completely inaccurate portrait of the real Jori Horikoshi’s attitude to his creation. The quote that inspired the film was “All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” But then this film goes out of its way to emphasise Horikoshi as a caring family man, a wholly sympathetic character, when to much of the world, Jiro Hirokoshi is a symbol of....

That. (And that’s the low estimate. It could easily be four times higher.)

But let’s look at how it relates to old Hayao and the contradictions he talks about living. If not to the same degree as old Isao Takahata, Miyazaki is an infamously exacting and demanding boss, heavily correcting nearly every cut that passes his desk. He’s spent his life working at a frankly kind of insane pace and expects his employees to keep up. Studio Ghibli has at least one dead body on its hands. Yet if you look at his films, they’re all about freedom and romanticism and the importance of enjoying nature. In Totoro, the dad is pulled away from his desk to play outside by his children. Probably not a good idea at Ghibli.

Then there are all the family relationships, all the way from the panda in Panda Kopanda to the mother in Ponyo. But Hayao Miyazaki was a distant father (he writes in Starting Point that his children were basically raised by their mother), and infamously callous to his son Gorō when he attempted to direct a film that Hayao didn’t think he was ready to handle.

Can we analogise animation to an aeroplane? It is beautiful in much the same way as an aeroplane is: elegant shapes, the technical coordination of many disparate parts to achieve an effect that would perhaps otherwise sound far-fetched (a flying machine? a picture that moves?). What’s the cost of animation? Well, thankfully nothing comparable to killing millions of people. But it is not a light undertaking. It is something that does eat lives. Is that a comparison that Miyazaki would have had in mind? I doubt it, honestly, but it’s what occurs to me faced with this film.

Thus I read the film’s Jori Horikoshi is a strange emotional blend of Hayao Miyazaki himself, an idealisation of his father or perhaps the sort of man he wishes his father was, and the real man who invented an effective fighter plane which helped enable his country to pillage most of Asia. And the rest of us? Well, the person working through these contradictions is Hayao Miyazaki, at the head of one of the highest concentrations of skilled animators the world has ever seen, so it’s going to be shared with nearly everyone. Would it probably have made more sense to do this in something like a manga, instead of a high profile movie? ...Well, I think so. But that’s not what happened, so we have this movie.

Inevitably for a late Ghibli movie, this film is crazy good looking. No Yoshinori Kanada anymore since he died in 2009, but Shinya Ohira is still alive, and he is absolutely capable of handling a Kanada-like background animation sequence. One of the most breathtaking sequences is the portrayal of the Great Kantō Earthquake by Atsuko Tanaka and Taichi Furumata, which combines both brilliant multiplane shots and unbelievably complex full background animation scenes of waves rippling through houses and streets. Tanaka also handled these mindblowing shots of cloth flowing in the wind as Naoko paints that form the film’s major recurring image.

The film uses slightly more digital compositing effects than the 90s pre-digital Ghibli films. For the most part the colours are just as lush as those older films, and there’s even very effective use of CG with handpainted textures now and then; Ghibli weathered the transition to digital a lot better than many studios.

And yet, despite all of this, it is a movie that leaves me feeling pretty unsatisfied, like a lot of late Ghibli movies. Hayao Miyazaki has said that he’s attempted to move away from familiar kishōtenketsu structures and try something novel, but when I watch films like Howl’s Moving Castle, I’m left wondering like... what did all of that amount to, in the end? For all its spectacle, what is this film even saying that Porco Rosso didn’t say... honestly, say better?

Maybe I’ll find an answer on a rewatch. It’s... far later than I planned to start, but if you’re willing to join me, please hop into twitch.tv/canmom and we’ll watch Hayao Miyazaki’s two big films about planes! And I’ll show you the Moomin thing too.

[docgold13]

365 Marvel Comics Paper Cut-Out SuperHeroes - One Hero, Every Day, All Year…

Supporting Character Supplemental - Callisto

The founder and frequently leader of The Morlocks.  Possessing greatly enhanced physical senses and abilities as well as a rapid healing factor that has greatly elongated her lifespan.  Callisto once lived a life of beauty, privilege and luxury but that all ended when her Mutant powers manifested and she was attacked by bigots who left her disfigured and blinded in one eye.  Turning her back on human society, Callisto went on to found Morllock society.

Callisto discovered a vast network of abandoned tunnels running throughout the underground of New York City.  She claimed these tunnels as a refuge for those Mutants who powers, appearances or other factors made it impossible for them to exist in human society.  The community they created together came to be known as The Morlocks (based upon the subterranean race form H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine).  

As the leader of these Morlocks, Callisto has been a recurring alley and (at times) adversary of The X-Men.  After abducting The Angel (whom Callisto saw as emblematic of those ‘beautiful Mutants’ who are able to assimilate into human society), Callisto ended up battling the X-Man, Storm, in one-on-one combat for leadership over the Morlocks.  Storm triumphed yet allowed Callisto to stay on as the community’s leader.  Oddly enough, this incident would prove to be the beginning of a very close friendship between Callisto and Storm.

Actress Dania Ramirez portrayed a version of Callisto in the Fox Films movie, X-3: X-Men United.  The heroine first appeared in Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 #169 (1983).

[tygerbug]

Star Wars Deleted Scene

Jabba The Hutt 1977 Declan Mulholland

HD restoration by Garrett Gilchrist.

https://archive.org/details/star-wars-deleted-scene-jabba-the-hutt-1977-declan-mulholland

This restoration took the better part of a month and involved digitally-painted animation keyframing in Photoshop throughout, at least once per second, with EBSynth and Rife generating a consistent appearance over the low quality sources.

Declan Mulholland played gangster Jabba the Hutt in a deleted scene from the original 1977 Star Wars. Some lines from this scene were used in Han's confrontation with Greedo. A clip of the first part of the scene appeared in 1983's "From Star Wars to Jedi."

For 1983's Return of the Jedi, Jabba the Hutt was redesigned as a large sluglike creature.

The 1981 Star Wars Radio Drama retcons this character to be a henchman of Jabba's nicknamed "Heater" (and the 70s comic adaptation uses a cantina alien, retconned to be Jabba's accountant Mosep Binneed).

In 1997, this scene was restored to the film with a CGI Jabba. Some clips were released when discussing the CGI work, although the scene has never been released in full.

The CGI version is edited slightly differently, with Jabba's shots being longer and Han and Chewie's shorter. Han is also often cut out from the background and missing parts around the edges. The scene was redone with a different CGI Jabba in 2004, with some changes made to the background as well.

star wars, deleted scene, deleted magic, a new hope, 1977, declan mulholland, harrison ford, han solo

[lemaistrechat]

Masters of the Universe: Snake and Lizard Men

Reptilian humanoids started appearing in MotU in the first, 1983, season of the Filmation cartoon.

Here’s Lizard Man, a supporting hero who appeared in four episodes.

Here is Fang Man, a bad guy who only appeared in “The Time Corridor”.

Bands of unnamed reptile men then appeared as wizards’ henchmen in two episodes, “House of Shokoti” and “Ordeal in the Darklands”.

So it already looks like we have two races of lizard people on Eternia. In Season 2, Kobra Khan was introduced.

In the very last episode, “The Cold Zone”, writer J. Michael Straczynski revealed that Kobra Khan had left the underground Repton civilization to commit crimes with Skeletor and friends. While their name was generically reptilian, named characters such as King Pythos indicate the entire people’s snakiness.

In 1986, the Snake Men faction was introduced to the toy line and its accompanying mini-comics. Members King Hiss, Sssqueeze and Snake Face were treated as having been banished by the Elders to a timeless dimension while living their evil lives thousands of years ago. Writer Steven Grant alluded to Kobra Khan’s people as descendants.

However, by the time kids would have opened this comic, the entire first season of (literal) sister show She-Ra would have aired, in September-December 1985. There, two other characters identified as Snake Men, Rattlor and Tung Lashor, were seen as members of Hordak’s Etherian Horde.

Both the mini-comic “King of the Snake Men” and newspaper comic arc “Vengeance of the Viper King” addressed these two being magically teleported from Etheria to Eternia to join King Hiss.

Unnamed Snake Men made two further appearances in the 80s: as hunter-gatherers who preceded Eternia’s first humans on the planet in the newspaper comic arc “Terror Takes Time” and as disorganized enemies of the five good wizards (Elders?) who organized under Hordak in the Power Tour stage show.

So much for official Snake Men. But we’re not done:

Almost simultaneously with him joining the Snake Men, Kobra Khan was seen commanding a band of evil lizard men (not to be confused with Lizard Man the hero) in the mini-comic “The Fastest Draw in the Universe”.

Jump forward to the summer of 1987 and fans were introduced to Saurod, a blue-scaled, bronze-armored mercenary employed by Skeletor in the live action film. He also appeared in all sorts of comics (mini-comic with the 3 film-related action figures, monthly comic, newspaper comic).

(pictured: Classics toy from 2015.)

While his armor looks like a fuller version of the partial plate armor we saw in the Repton culture, whether he was even native to Eternia was not explained at the time.

Then there’s one more before the Classics era. When He-Man traveled to another solar system in The New Adventures of He-Man, the Mutants of Denebria has their own lizard person, Lizorr.

He was said to be from the Gorn Desert of Denebria (a homage to the original Star Trek’s reptilian Gorn). His name suggests there’s no connection between his people and any Eternian Snake Men who ended up making their homes on Horde planets in the past two millennia or more.

[princesssarisa]

Character ask: Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol)

Tagged by anonymous

Favorite thing about them: How kind, gentle, and warm-hearted he is, and how much he loves his wife and children.

Least favorite thing about them: Hard to say... there's virtually nothing to dislike about him. But some might argue that he's too patient and resigned to his hard life. For example, when he raises a toast of gratitude to Scrooge as "the founder of the feast" on Christmas: of course it shows his generous spirit in contrast to Scrooge, but it might also send an unfortunate message of how "the deserving poor" react to their oppressors. At least in most versions, his wife is allowed to be bitter.

Three things I have in common with them:

*I try to be gentle and polite and avoid conflict.

*I enjoy spending time with children.

*I love Christmas.

Three things I don't have in common with them:

*I don't have a spouse or children of my own.

*For now at least, I don't live in poverty.

*I'm female.

Favorite line:

When his wife asks him how Tiny Tim behaved in church:

“As good as gold, and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

And in the vision of the family mourning Tim's death:

"But however and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim—shall we—or this first parting that there was among us?... And I know, I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.”

brOTP: His children, especially Tiny Tim, and Scrooge after he becomes a friend.

OTP: Mrs. Cratchit.

nOTP: Any of his children.

Random headcanon: After his fortunes improve thanks to Scrooge's redemption, when Tiny Tim is well and all their past concerns are behind them, Bob and Mrs. Cratchit will have a seventh child. The Annotated Christmas Carol points out that the Cratchits can be viewed as idealized versions of the Dickens family in young Charles's childhood, with the children corresponding in gender and birth order to himself and his siblings: Martha = Fanny, Peter = Charles himself, Belinda = Letitia, unnamed girl = Harriet, unnamed boy = Frederick, Tiny Tim = Alfred. But there's no equivalent of the youngest Dickens brother, Augustus, presumably because he wasn't born until Charles was a teenager. So I imagine that there will be another Cratchit son born after the events of the story.

Unpopular opinion: At the end of the "Tiny Tim's death" vision, he's not pretending when he says "I'm very happy." Whenever I see someone write that he "pretends to be happy" it doesn't ring true. Yes, his cheerfulness at the start of the scene is feigned, before he finally breaks down crying, but by the end, I'd like to think he takes real comfort in knowing that Tim will never be forgotten and that the memory of his goodness will always be an inspiration to the family. It doesn't erase his grief, but it's not just a facade either.

Song I associate with them:

"The Lord's Bright Blessing" from Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol:

"Christmas Children" from Scrooge (1970):

"One More Sleep Till Christmas" from The Muppet Christmas Carol:

Favorite pictures of them:

This classic illustration by John Leech:

This illustration by Sol Eytinge Jr.:

Gene Lockhart in the 1938 film:

Mervyn Johns in the 1951 film:

David Collings in the 1970 musical Scrooge:

From Richard Jones' 1971 animated version:

Mickey Mouse in Mickey's Christmas Carol, 1983:

David Warner in the 1984 TV film, with Anthony Walters as Tiny Tim:

Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Christmas Carol, 1992:

Motion-captured Gary Oldman in Disney's 2009 CGI film:

[theyboldlywent]

Paramount Home Video has announced that they’re releasing a deluxe box set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (The Director’s Edition), complete with reproduction stickers and promo material, an all-new booklet and more. This limited edition collection will also include the Theatrical Cut of the movie and the edit I had on VHS as a kid, the Special Longer Version that was created for ABC’s broadcast of the movie in 1983. 

This is in addition to individual 4k releases of the films featuring the original crew and a complete set featuring all six films.

You can get more details on TrekMovie.

(Last year, Paramount released a set featuring just the first four films in the series, leading me to assume they were going to do two more sets with three films each to cover the entire Prime timeline series. They could have The Final Frontier, The Undiscovered Country, and Generations in the second set to show the handoff to the TNG crew and then package the three TNG-only films together in such a way that people might actually pay money for Nemesis again. Silly of me to believe they’d do something that made sense!)

[themaresnest-dumblr]

Stranger Things Thoughts

The other half won’t approve, but as your humble narrator has access to binge watching the entirity of ‘Stranger Things’ from start to finish, decided to see what the fuss was all about.

First impressions?

It’s kind of a crossover between the video game Half Life and Goosebumps, and get the suspicion it was aimed at the Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Stephen King fans type target market.

It’s definitely a ‘binge watch’ series - just don’t see how it would have survived as a traditional one hour and one episode a week to hold people’s attention span, as some of the cliffhangers are weaker than train station cafe tea.

Will is really Fiver from the film version of Watership Down. Or Harry Potter’s scar. Just the scar.

Finn Wolfhard and Noah Schnapp were definitely recruited for reasons other than their acting abilities (ie. appealing to Jimmie Savile/Mrs Robinson types), because both are incredibly piss poor. It becomes quiet frightening as the show progresses how often Caleb McLaughlin’s over-the-top angry guy stuff appears to be to overcompensate for both being so insipid. Finn Wolfhard in particular seems to have the acting abilities of a blobfish.

By contrast, Gaten Matarazzo may have a face only a mother could love, but he carries a frighteningly large number of scenes without anyone really noticing it. He’s the Cartman of the gang, but all in a good way. Aside from being the originator of some of their most ‘cunning plans’, he’s the only one who appears to have learned good real life lessons from playing D&D: that is, to succeed against adversity, you need to stick together as a team, each playing to their strengths to compensate for other’s weaknesses.

Millie Bobbie Brown’s acting chops are formidable, but her constant use as a Deus Ex Machina becomes a little wearing after a while. On the other hand, her transformation into David Vanian of the Damned in Season 2 was hilarious.

Natalia Dyer’s jawbone is made from tungsten. There can be no other explanation.

Charlie Heaton is the reincarnation of Déagol from The Lord Of The Rings movies.

That Billy character had the worst case of being closet gay and aggressively in denial about it since Vaas Montenegro in Far Cry 3.

When Will suddened declares that the Big Bad is back in Season 3, right after his fall out with his buds not wanting to be stuck in his D&D timewarp, isn’t it jarring that no one questions it? After all, mega-convenient way of getting the gang back together on his terms, yes?

David Harbour’s Angry Dad routine gets wearing REALLY quickly in season 3.

Why does Winona Ryder’s character give the constant appearence of being a recovering alcoholic?

Steve Harrington’s reaction to Robin admitting she was a lesbian (while turning him down) is ludicrously out of context with what would actually have happened to any woman admitting as much in the 1980s, especially slap bang in the very year the AIDS panic took off in the U.S. (largely after haemophiliac teen Ryan White contracted it via a dodgy blood transfusion, bringing out into the open American’s utterly f**ked up pay-for-blood donation system into question).

Why are none of the kids playing computer games? At all?

The music is meant to be 80s, but they have some real issues with it as much as the supposed 80s clothes and haircuts.

(Here comes the Madame Lee bit, concentrate!)

Season One - It’s Meant To Be 1983, but ....

Jefferson Airplane - 'She Has Funny Cars' and 'White Rabbit'

By the 1980s, Jefferson Airplane were Jefferson Starship, and the drugged out hippies like so many psychedelics and prog rockers had gone down the AOR/Cock Rock route.

By the timeline of 'Stranger Things' the band was falling apart as their brief period of late 70s success burned out - ironically they were to score their biggest hits as plain old post-court case Starship were forced to go even more commercial, with global No.1's with 1985's 'We Build This City (On Rock 'n' Roll)' and 1987's 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now' (the latter the theme song to the hit movie 'Mannaquin') - after which they all but vanished. Jefferson Airplane's back catalogue meanwhile was virtually unsellable at this time.

The inclusion of 'White Rabbit' may have been a scriptwriter's brick joke - as during Eleven's brief runaway in season two, she changes her look to one resembling to a remarkable degree David Vanian of the Damned during the period when, in sheer desperation for a hit outside of the UK, the band did a cover of Jefferson Airplane's most famous track (it flopped, as all covers of this song tend to do).

Toto - Africa

The song which has become an internet meme was released in 1984 ... a year after the events of season one.

The Clash - Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

The other 'theme song' for Season One, played umpteen times during the series. A hit in the summer of 1982, rush released in panic by CBS after the original taster single flopped.

Contrary to historical revision, The Clash were never a major band in the punk era and largely enjoyed only a few minor hits: the major exception was this Mick Jones written track and drummer Topper Headon's 'Rock The Casbah', both for 1982's 'Combat Rock' - when the band had been told by CBS to write a commercially sellable album or have their contract terminated (contrary to the name, it sounds more like a funk record

But by 1983, The Clash were effectively no more: band 'leader' Joe Strummer's ego couldn't handle 'his bass player' and 'his drummer' getting the band's first two truly global selling singles (the two Strummer singles from the album, 'Straight To Hell' and 'Know Your Rights' flopped), and sacked Jones in a fit of pique, after which Headon resigned.

Brotherhood Of Man - Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree

This one is positively embarrassing. Brotherhood Of Man never recorded this song until 2002.

To be fair, a lot of people do get this Brit band (punk's most famous victims: a former Eurovision song contest winner dropped by their record company abruptly after scoring their final No.1 'Figaro' because they were 'old hat') mixed up with Tony Orlando's Dawn, who did the original global hit.

The Bangles - Hazy Shade Of Winter

The Bangles may have covered it in concert, but it was never released on record until 1987.

Foreigner - Waiting For A Girl Like You

From 1981, two years earlier.

Peter Gabriel - Heroes

Oh FFS! Gabriel's murdering of the late David Bowie classic only happened in 2010 for his cover versions album 'Scratch My Back' aka 'Utterly Out Of Ideas'.

Joy Division - Atmosphere

Four years too late, or five years too early, depending on your point of view.

By the timeline of this, nazi bigot Ian Curtis had done the world a favour and hanged himself four years prior (this song was released as a post-suicide cash in, but flopped), and Joy Division had changed name to New Order precisely to cleanse its association with him (ironically they had a mammoth global hit with 'Blue Monday', one of the songs of the 1980s, in 1983, but it never made the show.

A remixed and cleaned up version of 'Atmosphere' was released as a successful standalone single in 1988, as Joy Division's back-catalogue became more critically reappaised with the success of New Order and the moribund far-right no longer being considered a matter of wide scale concern.

Season Two - It's meant to be 1984, but ...

Devo - Whip It

From 1980. Even more ironically, by 1984 the band were virtual pariahs in the United States having 'sold out' their sound for the sake of their New Zealand fanbase (the only place they were ever truly successful). New Zealand wasn't long in following suit ...

Duran Duran - Girls On Film

Arguable. Three years too late - but the song did very heavy rotation in 1983 and 1984 on MTV, bringing them to mass attention, but never became a U.S. hit - it was the follow up, 'Hungry Like The Wolf' which broke the U.S. for them.

The Clash - This Is Radio Clash

Flop single from 1981, except in Sweden where it reached No.9 - a year later.

Shock Therepy - Can Do What I Want

One year too early.

Fad Gadget - Back To Nature

Again, one year too early.

John Carpenter - The Bank Robbery

One of the most infamous show howlers. The song comes from the 1981 movie 'Escape From New York' ... except it never made it to the soundtrack and indeed remained unknown to the general public until making it on a collection of 21st century 'lost' soundtrack tunes.

The best known example of the show's producers self-indulging rather than keeping things on theme.

Season Three -  It's meant to be 1985, but ...

Stray Cats - Rock This Town

Not only was it four years too late, but the band had split two years earlier and were by that time in the zeitgeist regarded as something of a joke - an attempted reunion in 1986 ended in near empty halls and humiliation all round, as by this time more visually appealing bands like King Kurt and The Cramps had taken up whatever rockabilly audience remained.

Cutting Crew - (I Just) Died In Your Arms Tonight

This walking abortion of a song from a walking abortion of a band encapsulated everything bland and faux about the 1980s, but it wasn't until the summer of 1986 it appeared.

Go-Go's - Get Up And Go

From 1984 - by which time the Go-Go's had messily folded and were already forgotten. By the following year, the success of Belinda Carlisle further hastened their erasure from the zeitgeist, and it’s only in recent years their ‘legacy’ has been reappraised.

Foreigner - Cold As Ice

Those involved in the show seem to have a major hard on for Foreigner, but putting this song, which sound dated enough upon its release in 1977 - never mind 1985 - was beyond belief.

Trevor Jones - The Pod Dance

Taken from 1983's 'The Dark Crystal' soundtrack - just about the only time having a tune vastly out of place song worked, during the painful to watch sequence where Will attempts to get two of his friends to play a session of Dungeons & Dragons, unable to accept that their interests have moved on to girls - Will's timing being especially poor as both are suffering crises in their respective puppy love lives.

Will - already silly looking enough with his pudding bowl haircut - appears utterly ludicrous to the point of disturbing in a purple wizard outfit complete with hat and starry cloak (he looks like the sort of children's entertainer that gets arrested on child molestation charges), trying aggressively to get his friends to care less.

You'd have to go back to the film 'Ghostworld' for a better sequence of watching childhood friends drifting apart, and 'Stranger Things' succeeded in five minutes what it took a whole film to do, and the choice of music was perfect.

By contrast ...

Dame Vera Lynn - We'll Meet Again One of the songs of World War Two, especially to armed forces personnel being sent across the world with the very real prospect of never seeing their loved ones again, it's often been used ironically (eg. the multiple nuclear bomb ending of the film 'Dr Strangelove'), it was also the first single to feature a synthesiser (yes, really!)

Its use at the end of the episode where evil Billy has escaped back to the spider monster thing's lair, knowing now Eleven and the rest of the meddling kids are onto them, is jarring.

Possum River - Stand Up and Meet Your Brother

From 1971 - complete self indulgence. Didn't even go with the carnival sequence.

Yello - Goldrush

A full year too early.

Hmmmmm, onward to Season Four, which is all about The Ginger One, well it will need to have a bloody amazing script to pull it off, as she was someone only stomachable in small doses at the best of times ...

[noanunoparty]

18/01/23 ~ NTS Radio ~ Ryuichi Sakamoto Special

For the past 2 months I've listened to every album, soundtrack, composition, live recording that Ryuichi Sakamoto has made. There have been a lot of tears. A lot of reflection on life, on mortality, on social harmony and the environment. A loooot of emotions have been felt.

All of this research has solidified my respect for Sakamoto as an artist. A true pioneer. A maestro. Condensing his career into 2 hours has been difficult, but I hope you enjoy the show and my notes.

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Ryuichi Sakamoto has released over 20 solo studio albums, 10+ live albums, several compilation albums, over 40 EPs and singles, and about 48 soundtracks.

1978 - Thousand Knives - Plastic Bamboo

Sakamoto’s first solo album, created with the help of Hideki Matsutake who was known as the 4th member of YMO. The album fused electronic music with traditional Japanese sounds whilst incorporating elements of modern classical and reggae. 

On the album cover, from Taeko Onuki “I was told that the jacket he’s wearing was an Armani and chosen by Yukihiro. I had only known Sakamoto in jeans and rubber sandals and he said to me, “What do you think?!

2. 1980 - B-2 Unit - Riot in Lagos 

Sakamoto’s “edgiest” album. B-2 Unit birthed Riot In Lagos which is said to be an early example of electro. Several electro and hip hop artists were influenced by the album, especially Riot In Lagos. 

“Differencia" has, according to Fact, "relentless tumbling beats and a stabbing bass synth that foreshadows jungle by nearly a decade". Some tracks on the album also foreshadow genres such as IDM, broken beat, and industrial techno. For several tracks on the album, Sakamoto worked with Dennis Bovell, incorporating elements of afrobeat and dub. 

Another recommended track: E-3A

3. 1981 - Left-Handed Dream / Hidari Ude No Yume - Kacha Kucha Nee

Sakamoto wanted to record an album rooted in pop and created Left-Handed Dream (or Hidari Ude No Yume), which displays a variety of global influences through the instruments used - marimba, didgeridu, traditional Japanese instruments such as the sho and hichiriki flutes. The album showcased Sakamoto’s ability to seamlessly combine Eastern and Western sounds, strengthened through collaborating with Talking Heads guitarist Adrian Belew & co-producing with Robin Scott. 

Venezia would then become the Left Bank! 

4. 1982 - Bamboo Houses 

Sakamoto continues his long-standing collaboration with David Sylvian of Japan, Sylvian’s first solo project outside of the band. Featuring Steve Jansen on drums. 

5. 1983 - Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence Soundtrack - Forbidden Colours

Sakamoto’s first film score, for Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence which he also starred in alongside David Bowie. David Sylvian contributed lyrics and vocals on Forbidden Colours, which became a hit and a vocal version of the main theme, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. The soundtrack won a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music in 1984. 

Another recommended track: Germination

6. 1984 - Ongaku Zukan - Etude

Ongaku Zukan was an experimental album with no deadline - created around Sakamoto’s incredibly busy schedule in 1983, which saw Yellow Magic Orchestra pause their group activities after an intense 8 years of recording and touring. Features from Hosono, Takahashi, Minako Yoshida and Tatsuro Yamashita. 

Sakamoto recalls he got started on the album without having a clear direction for its content: "Making an album without a blueprint...... it's an adventure to see what happens like when you embark on a sea voyage without a compass or chart. If you follow a blueprint, you will be able to record efficiently and in a short period, but I removed all of that and made it that way."

Sakamoto likens this production method to "automatic writing", which is known as one of the methods of surrealism:

"I went into the studio and recorded what came out without any prejudice...... I made it as if in a kind of trance. It could be something classical, it could be pop. Regardless of style and unity, the major premise was to accept everything that was made, so we created a lot of songs."

7. 1985 - Esperanto - A Rain Song 

Sakamoto’s 6th solo album, orginally composed for a performance by New York choreographer Molissa Fenley. An experiment with new sampler technology - apparently Sakamoto needed a huge computer to make this score. 

Another recommended track: A Wongga Dance Song

8. 1986 - Futurista - GT

Futurista (未来派野郎, translates literally as "Futurist Bastard") was created as a response to the Futurist Movement - an artistic and social movement originated in Italy. Mid 80-s avant-garde synthpop perfection! 

Sakamoto samples a lot throughout this album - G.T. samples “Legs” by Art of Noise. 

9. 1986 - Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia - Field Work (ft. Thomas Dolby)

The reissued English titled version of Ongaku Zukan, intended for the international market. It combines about half of the tracks from the 1984 album with newer singles "Steppin' Into Asia" and "Field Work” ft. Thomas Dolby.

10. 1987 - Neo Geo - Risky ft. Iggy Pop

The term "neo geo", or "new world", is derived from Sakamoto himself as a way to describe worldwide musical diversity in regard to genre (similar to world music and world beat). Again, showcasing Sakamoto’s ability to combine Eastern and Western musical styles. 

Bootsy Collins on bass! 

11. 1987 - The Last Emperor Soundtrack - First Coronation 

The soundtrack features 9 pieces composed by Sakamoto, 5 by David Byrne & 1 from Cong Su. The album won Best Original Score at the 1988 Academy Awards.

12. 1989 - Beauty - You Do Me

8th solo studio album, which sees his solo career begin to extend outside of Japan. Beauty is notable for its "collage of styles" that range from rock, techno, and classical to flamenco, African, and Japanese traditional, featuring a long list of collaborators.  

In discussing whether music is narrative and illustrative or an abstract medium, Sakamoto said, "I have visions sometimes when I'm writing contemporary music, even when it's very logical. For example, for one of my songs on the album Beauty, I was always having visions of Amazonian rainforests, a little plane flying very low over the trees. Trees, trees, trees, and some birds. But the title of the song is 'Calling from Tokyo'".

13. 1991 - Heartbeat - Rap to the World

Sequel from Beauty, still collaging sounds from all over the world, this time in an eclectic upbeat fashion. You can hear the dance music influences throughout this album, which is enforced through the credits - notably Towa Tei and Satoshi Tomiie. 

14. 1994 - Sweet Revenge - Same Dream, Same Destination

One of my least favourite Sakamoto albums - the strings are beautiful but a lot of the vocals miss for me. But this song + the cover is iconic! Maybe he was just gearing up for his next album, Smoochy. 

The album title refers to Sakamoto’s wish to bring a sense of melody back to the “rhythm-obsessed pop-world”.

15. 1995 - Smoochy - A Day In The Park

An exploration of the old world meeting the future - Sakamoto combines Latin tinged sounds, jazz and the possibilities of the internet through electronic experimentation with an “listening” approach running throughout Smoochy. 

16. 1996 - 1996 - Bibo no Aozora (Trio World Tour Live recording) 

1996 contains a selection of Sakamoto's most popular compositions plus two new compositions, all arranged for a standard piano trio. The arrangement of "Bibo no Aozora" that appears on this album has appeared in several film and television projects.

A concert, called Ryuichi Sakamoto Trio World Tour, was organised in 1996. This concert was played at 6 venues in Japan, and the Bunkamura Orchard Hall concert was live streamed on August 28, 1996 on the Internet, and was one of the first concerts to be streamed.

17. 1997 - Discord - Salvation 

Sakamoto’s first full length orchestral work, which sees him contrasting modern musical tools with traditional instruments. Amongst procrastination and self-imposed deadlines, Sakamoto wrote the four movements in Discord ("Grief," "Anger," "Prayer," "Salvation") in a month. He finished writing the last notes on the morning of the first rehearsal with the orchestra. 

Salvation features spoken word contributions from Laurie Anderson, DAvid Byrne, Patti Smith and Banana Yoshimoto. 

18. 1998 - BTTB (Back To the Basics) - Energy Flow

Sakamoto was stuck in a traffic jam and melody popped into his head. That melody would then become Opus - the opening track of his solo piano album, BTTB - Back To The Basics. BTTB & Discord see Sakamoto’s departure from his pop-tinged outputs as he returns to the piano. 

19. 2002 - Elephantism - Great Africa 

Elephantism stands out from the rest of Sakamoto’s discography as it’s his first venture into new-age, ambient sounds with elements of African musical styles, featuring field recordings. 

Elephantism is a reflection of Sakamoto’s life ethos, where he strives for world peace. In his search for harmony, he turns to nature - specifically the elephant. “Elephantism is the state of being compassionate, loyal and loving towards family and friends, and being understanding and generous in attitude toward other clans; it means being big and expansive in your outlook on life, not small and mean; it means showing thoughtful consideration, wisdom and dignity when necessary, but in equal measure showing powerful expression and emotion, and being, yes, a little wild and passionate now and then!”

20. 2002 - Works I - CM - Old I (Suntory 1983) 

Compilation of music written for various commercials (called CM in Japan), all works are from 1983 to 1984. Monopoly is a favourite (didn’t have enough time to include it in the show!) 

21. 2004 - Chasm - Ngo/Bitmix

Sakamoto’s 15th solo studio album. Chasm is experimental, combining the paion with ambient and glitch programming. Features contributions from Hosno and Takahasi, under their Sketch Show alias. 

22. 2005 - Insen - Avaol 

Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s second studio album - their collaboration began in 2002. “Both explore the potential for interaction and tension between electronic and acoustic instrumentation”.

23. 2009 - Out of Noise - composition 0919 

Sakamoto was one of a handful of concerned artists who took part in The Cape Farewell Project, where scientists joined with the creative community for a conference in Greenland to address and investigate global warming. During his stay in Greenland, Sakamoto made a number of field recordings that he incorporated into his album Out of Noise; the album is dominated by graceful, minimalist keyboard pieces punctuated by electronic noise, ambient sounds and bits of found voices.

24. 2017 - async - Zure

Sakamoto’s 19th studio album - his first one in 8 years since Out of Noise. It’s also his first full length solo record since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. During this 8 year “break” he felt uninspired with the composition process and focused on scoring films. Despite his recovery, Sakamoto thought that async would be his last album. "That’s why I tried to forget all the rules and forms, anything. I just wanted to put down just what I wanted to hear, just a sound or music, it doesn’t matter. This could be the last time."

He began making async in 2016 and completed it in 8 months. 

Async is unusually textural, featuring both acoustic and electronic elements plus samples recordings readings and field recordings of city streets. Sakamoto’s worries of death seep into the album, which were influenced by his experience with cancer and the many earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan in 2011. “We were warned about how our civilisation is fragile and how the force of nature is great."

25. 2023 - 12 - 20220123

Maybe one of Sakamoto’s most moving albums. 

His breath can heard throughout 12 like a metronome - keeping time, evoking the feeling of a warm embrace and making us are of how fleeting life is. It has a palpable level of intimacy to it, as if you’re in the room with him as he plays the piano. 

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Ending on a few of my favourite Sakamoto quotes:

"I hate to divide the world -- East and West. Where is the edge? My music is much more melting."

"I want to be a citizen of the world. It sounds very hippie, but I like that."

[red-berin]

The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo

“Gay visibility has never really been an issue in the movies. Gays have always been visible. It’s how they have been visible that has remained offensive for almost a century.”

-Vito Russo

The Celluloid Closet discusses exactly that. Gay people have been a part of movies for as long as movies have existed. However, they haven’t had the freedom to portray themselves as they might have wanted. Russo discusses many movies with gay background and main characters. He also delves into how those portrayals affected American society’s perception of gay people.

For those interested, I am posting the movies that he mentions underneath a cut. Russo also gives a brief summary of how the LGBT characters in these movies are handled. As a content warning, Russo published this edition in 1987 and may use language that some might not be comfortable with. However, I transcribe the exact language he uses.

Filmography

The filmography lists films in which obviously lesbian or gay characters appear and films in which reference is made to homosexuality. Where indicated, a film is included because homosexuality was deleted from it or from its original source material. Title, director and year of release are followed by a brief annotation.

Abuse     Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., 1983. A story about child abuse and an intergenerational love affair between a gay filmmaker and a young man.

Adam’s Rib     George Cukor, 1949. David Wayne as Kip, Katharine Hepburn’s composer friend.

The Adversary    Larry Klein, 1970. Howard Lawrence as Jimmy West.

Advise and Consent     Otto Preminger, 1962. Don Murray as Brig Anderson, the senator with a secret.

After Hours     Martin Scorsese, 1985. Scorsese’s least homophobic film thanks to the intervention of Robert Plunket, the actor who portrayed Mark, the lonely homosexual picked up by Griffin Dunne.

Alex and the Gypsy     John Korty, 1976. A homosexual prisoner cut from the final print.

Alexandria . . . Why?     Youssef Chahine, 1978. Autobiographical film featuring a love affair between an aristocratic Arab nationalist and a young English soldier.

American Gigolo     Paul Schrader, 1980. A gay killer, a lesbian pimp and a gay wife beater.

Anders als die Anderen     Richard Oswald, 1919. Pioneer German gay liberation film.

Anders als du und ich     Veidt Harlan, 1957. Reactionary melodrama about a gay child molester.

The Anderson Tapes     Sidney Lumet, 1971. Martin Balsam as a cowardly gay thief.

Angel     Robert Vincent O’Neil, 1984. Teenaged prostitute and, according to the New York Times, one of the top sleazemobiles of 1984. Throw in an alcoholic lesbian and a tacky drag queen.

The Anniversary     Roy Ward Baker, 1968. Bette Davis’ transvestite son steals women’s nylons from clotheslines.

Another Country     Marek Kanievska, 1984. Sumptuously romanticized version of the Guy Burgess story, linking homosexuality with politics in a very tenuous manner.

Any Wednesday     Robert Ellis Miller, 1966. An effeminate interior decorator.

Army of Lovers, or Revolt of the Perverts     Rosa von Praunheim, 1978. A view of the American gay movement.

The Bad News Bears     Michael Ritchie, 1976. Nine-year-old Timmy Lupus can’t play baseball but mixes a perfect martini.

The Balcony     Joseph Strick, 1963. Shelley Winters as a madam who has a thing for her bookkeeper (Lee Grant).

Barbarella     Roger Vadim, 1968. Anita Pallenberg as the Black Queen and John Phillip Law as a gay angel.

Barry Lyndon     Stanley Kubrick, 1975. A gratuitous and offensive scene, allegedly conceived by homophobe Ryan O’Neal, shows two gay soldiers bathing in a river.

Becket     Peter Glenville, 1964. A gay love story.

Bedazzled     Stanley Donen, 1967. Two of the seven deadly sins, Vanity and Envy, are gay stereotypes.

Before Stonewall     Greta Schiller, 1985. Documentary history of pre-Stonewall gay liberation movement with rare film footage.

Belle de Jour     Louis Buñuel, 1967. Genevieve Page as a lesbian madam.

Ben-Hur     Fred Niblo, 1926. An erotic scene of a naked slave chained to a ship’s galley wall.

Ben-Hur     William Wyler, 1959. A submerged gay subtext between Messala and Ben-Hur.

The Best Man     Franklin Schaffner, 1964. Cliff Robertson as the presidential candidate accused of homosexuality.

The Best Way (La Meilleure Façon de marcher)     Claude Miller, 1976. Tea and Sympathy with a French accent and guts.

The Betsy     Daniel Petrie, 1978. Paul Rudd as a gay who commits suicide.

Beverly Hills Cop     Martin Bres, 1984. Eddie Murphy’s mindless fag routine is violently homophobic.

Beyond the Valley of Dolls     Russ Meyer, 1970. Middlebrow trash with a homophobic attitude.

Les biches     Claude Chabrol, 1968. A lesbian zipless fuck.

The Big Sky     Howard Hawks, 1952. Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin rough it.

A Bigger Splash     Jack Hazan, 1974. A documentary about the life and friends of a gay artist. Stutifying.

Billy Budd     Peter Ustinov, 1962. Terence Stamp drives the sailors wild.

Blacula     William Crain, 1972. Weak, decadent white faggot gets bitten.

Blood and Roses     Roger Vadim, 1960. Lesbian vampires strike again.

Bloodbrothers     Robert Mulligan, 1978. A gay jeweler hates his father.

Blood Money     Rowland Brown, 1933. Sandra Shaw in a tuxedo.

Bloody Mama     Roger Corman, 1970. Dominant, aggressive mother, absent father.

Blue Velvet     David Lynch, 1986. Dean Stockwell can easily be read as gay if you buy the idea that Lynch is recreating the Fifties here.

Bonnie and Clyde     Arthur Penn, 1967. Clyde’s sexuality changed for the screen from bisexual to impotent.

Boom!     Joseph Losey, 1968. Noel Coward as the Witch of Capri.

The Boston Strangler     Richard Fleischer, 1968. Hurd Hatfield as a gay murder suspect.

The Boys in the Band     William Friedkin, 1970. The first Hollywood film in which all the principal characters are homosexual.

The Boys Next Door     Penelope Spheeris, 1986. Fascinating, violent splatter film about psychologically disturbed closet homosexual. A great performance by Kenneth Cortland in a small role.

The Broadway Melody     Harry Beaumont, 1929. A gay costume designer.

Buddies     Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., 1985. The first narrative feature about the AIDS crisis is personal and shattering. A story of love and politics.

Bumping into Broadway     Hal Roach, 1919. Gus Leonard in drag as the landlady of a theatrical boardinghouse.

Bus Riley’s Back in Town     Harvy Hart, 1965. A lecherous gay mortician.

Busting     Peter Hyams, 1974. Sleazy gay bars, tearoom cruisers and hustlers versus the vice squad.

Butley     Harold Pinter, 1974. Gay teacher (Alan Bates) makes everybody miserable.

By Design     Claude Jutra, 1981. Lesbian fashion designers contrive to have a baby by looking for a substitute father.

Cabaret     Box Fosse, 1972. Michael York as a bisexual Brian.

La Cage aux Folles     Edouard Molinaro, 1978. The first gay box office smash.

La Cage aux Folles II     Edouard Molinaro, 1980. Dimwit sequel; featuring Albin jumping out of a cake looking like Ethel Merman.

La Cage aux Folles III     Georges Lautner, 1985. Hideously boring crap that took five screenwriters to put together.

Caged     John Cromwell, 1950. Lesbianism in a woman’s prison. “Who’s the cute new trick?”

Caged Heat     Jonathan Demme, 1972. Lesbian subplot.

California Split     Robert Altman, 1974. A lesbian waitress doesn’t fall for Elliot Gould and George Segal, so they belittle a transvestite.

California Suite     Herbert Ross, 1978. Michael Caine as the gay husband of movie star Maggie Smith.

Camille     George Cukor, 1937. Rex O’Malley as Garbo’s gay friend.

Can’t Stop the Music     Nancy Walker, 1980. The Village People; not a gay film.

Caprice     Frank Tashlin, 1967. Ray Walston as a transvestite killer.

Caravaggio     Derek Jarman, 1986. A highly personal, idiosyncratic meditation on the painter through his life work.

Car Wash     Michael Schultz, 1976. Antonio Fargas as Lindy the militant faggot transvestite.

Casanova     Federico Fellini, 1976. He tried men too.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof     Richard Brooks, 1958. Why couldn’t Paul Newman sleep with Elizabeth Taylor? A mystery movie.

Chanel Solitaire     George Kaczender, 1981. Frivolous romantic nonsense about Coco Chanel including brief reference to her lesbian affair with Misia Sert, played by Simone Signoret’s daughter, Catherine Allegret.

Un chant d’amour     Jean Genet, 1947. A revolutionary film about homoeroticism and repression.

The Chelsea Girls     Andy Warhol, 1966. Faggots and dykes with messy apartments and boring opinions.

The Children’s Hour     William Wyler, 1962. Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine accused of having “sinful sexual knowledge of one another.”

The Choirboys     Robert Aldrich, 1977. Homophobic cops, and fags with pink poodles.

A Chorus Line     Richard Attenborough, 1985. Timid bowdlerization of the original musical with gay monologue cut to ribbons for a teen audience.

The Christine Jorgensen Story     Irving Rapper, 1970. The famous sex change story played by John Hansen.

Chu Hai Tang     Japanese-Chinese co-production, 1943. A general and a female impersonator from the Peking opera.

Cinderella     Walt Disney, 1950. Jock and Gus-Gus aren’t just good friends.

Cleopatra Jones     Jack Starrett, 1973. Shelley Winters as “Mommy,” a lesbian gang leader.

Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold     Chuck Basil, 1975. Stella Stevens as a lesbian dragon-lady dope seller.

The Clinic     David Stevens, 1982. Australian farce set in a VD clinic with several gay characters sprinkled throughout.

Colonel Redl     Istvan Szabo, 1985. Head of Austrian imperial secret service exposed as homosexual and spy.

The Color Purple     Steven Spielberg, 1985. Alice Walker’s original concept that Celie finds love through intimacy with another woman completely thrown away by Spielberg.

Come Back to that Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean     Robert Altman, 1983. Karen Black as the transsexual who comes back to haunt her childhood friends.

The Conformist     Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970. If you sleep with your family chauffeur as a child, it’ll make you a fascist.

The Consequence     Wolfgang Petersen, 1977. Romantic melodrama; two gay lovers betrayed by the world around them.

Coonskin     Ralph Bakshi, 1975. Snowflake the black drag queen as a sadomasochist.

Crossfire     Edward Dmytryk, 1947. A story about homophobia changed to one about anti-Semitism.

Cruising     Wiliiam Friedkin, 1980. A policeman discovers his own homosexuality and becomes a killer.

The Damned (Les Maudits)     René Clément, 1947. Michel Auclair plays a homosexual.

The Damned     Luchino Visconti, 1969. Helmut Berger does Dietrich; the night of the long knives as an underwear party.

Dangerously They Live     Robert Florey, 1942. Connie Gilchrist as a Nazi lesbian.

Darling     John Schlesinger, 1965. Julie Christie’s gay photographer friend and a bisexual waiter who sleeps with them both.

Day for Night     François Truffaut, 1973. Jean-Pierre Aumont is given a handsome young lover but loses him in a car crash.

The Day of the Jackal     Fred Zinnermann, 1973. Edward Fox kills a gay man he meets in a bathhouse.

The Day of the Locust     John Schlesinger, 1975. Stars former homosexual William Atherton and features Paul Jabara as an art deco transvestite.

The Day the Fish Came Out     Michael Cacoyannis, 1967. Senseless confusion about homosexuals and the atom bomb; the film is an atom bomb.

Death in Venice     Luchino Visconti, 1971. Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach.

Deathtrap     Sidney Lumet, 1982. Amorous relationship between Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, lovers trying to do away with Caine’s wife.

Deliverance     John Boorman, 1972. Male rape spoils the fun on a buddy holiday.

The Deputy     Eloy de la Iglesia, 1978. The socialist party is legalized in the wake of Franco’s death and the fascists set a trap for a “faggot politico.”

Desert Hearts     Donna Deitch, 1986. Adaptation of Jane Rule’s novel about a divorcee who falls in love with a free-spirited woman in Reno in the 1950s.

Designing Woman     Vincente Minelli, 1957. Jack Cole as the choreographer.

The Detective     Gordon Douglas, 1968. Homosexual murder on the New York waterfront. A film about the closet, covers the same ground as Cruising but more effectively and not offensively.

Diamonds are Forever     Guy Hamilton, 1971. Two gay lovers who kill people.

Diary of a Mad Housewife     Frank Perry, 1970. The character played by Frank Langella, according to everyone who saw it.

A Different Story     Paul Aaron, 1978. Gays turn straight.

Dr. Strangelove     Stanley Kubrick, 1964. Homosexuality of Paul Seller’s president of the United States reportedly removed.

Doctors’ Wives     George Schaefer, 1971. Rachel Roberts has an affair when a woman tries to take a cinder out of her eye and they suddenly see each other for the first time.

Dog Day Afternoon     Sidney Lumet, 1975. The true story of a gay bank robber.

La Dolce Vita     Federico Fellini, 1960. Transvestite predicts that by the year 2000 everyone will be homosexual.

Domestic Bliss     Joy Chamberlain, 1985. British made-for-television sitcom about lesbian lovers and their adventures with neighbors, children and ex-husbands.

Dona Herlinda and Her Son     Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1986. Light-hearted unusual film from Mexico about a mother, her son and his lover.

Down and Out in Beverly Hills     Paul Mazursky, 1986. Has the dubious distinction of containing the first tasteless AIDS joke in a major motion picture.

Dracula’s Daughter     Lambert Hillyer, 1936. Gloria Holden stalks Soho for young girls.

The Dresser     Peter Yates, 1983. Tom Courtenay as the prissy dresser who secretly loves the actor he serves.

Drum     Steve Carver, 1976. A plantation owner (John Colicos) and his fey lover (Alain Patrick) who rape black men.

Easy Living     Mitchell Leisen, 1937. Frankllin Pangborn as a man in ladies’ hats.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds     Paul Newman, 1972. Joanne Woodward yells “Faggot!” at a guy she doesn’t turn on.

The Eiger Sanction     Clint Eastwood, 1975. Jack Cassidy as Myles the gay killer, and his dog Faggot.

An Englishman Abroad     John Schlesinger, 1984. The true story of Guy Burgess and his meeting with actress Coral Browne. One of the best hours of television ever produced.

Entertaining Mr. Sloane     Douglas Hickox, 1970. Screen version of Joe Orton’s play, seldom seen.

Enter the Dragon     Robert Clouse, 1973. Bruce Lee chops a faggot.

Erika’s Passions     Ula Stöckl, 1978. The second time around for a pair of lesbian lovers.

Ernesto     Salvatore Samperi, 1979. Story of a man’s homosexual awakening, based on an autobiographical novel by Italian poet Umberto Saba.

Evil Under the Sun     Guy Hamilton, 1982. Roddy McDowell as Rex Brewster, faggot gossip columnist.

Exodus     Otto Preminger, 1960. “They used me - like a woman!” scream Sal Mineo in some of the ads - and in the film.

Face to Face      Ingmar Bergman, 1976. Liv Ullmann’s doctor as a well-adjusted gay man.

Fame     Alan Parker, 1980. Paul McCrane as Montgomery, the only gay student at Performing Arts High School (if you can believe that one).

The Family Way     Roy Boulting, 1966. Intelligent and quite moving homosexual panic film.

The Fan     Edward Bianchi, 1981. Michael Biehn as yet another psychotic closet case.

Farewell, My Lovely     Dick Richards, 1975. Ambiguous underworld gay types; Mitchum plays with the possibilities as a no-nonsense dick.

The Fearless Vampire Hunters     Roman Polanski, 1967. A gay vampire.

Fig Leaves     Howard Hawks, 1926. A sexism primer.

Fireworks     Kenneth Anger, 1947. A homoerotic dream.

Five Easy Pieces     Bob Rafelson, 1970. Toni Basil and Helena Kallianiotes as lesbian hitchhikers.

Flaming Creatures     Jack Smith, 1963. An experiment with androgynous revels.

A Florida Enchantment     Sydney Drew, 1914. A role reversal comedy from a Broadway play by a gay man.

For Heaven’s Sake     Sam Taylor, 1926. Harold Lloyd as a sissy youth.

Fortune and Men’s Eyes     Harvey Hart, 1971. An abortive attempt to film the John Herbert stage play.

Forty Deuce     Paul Morrissey, 1982. Inconsequential film version of Alan Bowne’s brilliant play about Times Square street hustlers.

The Fourth Man     Paul Verhoeven, 1983. Obsessive sexual desire and witchcraft. Fascinating in spite of its religious overtones.

The Fox     Mark Rydell, 1968. Lesbians on a Canadian chicken farm.

Fox and His Friends (Faustrecht der Freiheit)     Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. A film about class struggle often mistaken for a film about homosexuality.

Fräulein Doktor     Alberto Lattuada, 1969. Lesbian spies and nerve gas.

Freebie and the Bean     Richard Rush, 1974. Christopher Morley as a killer transvestite; lots of fag jokes.

From Russia with Love     Terence Young, 1963. Lotte Lenya as Colonel Rosa Klebb, the dyke with the spike.

Funny Lady     Herbert Ross, 1975. Roddy McDowall plays a fag joke.

Garbo Talks     Sidney Lumet, 1984. Harvey Fierstein as Bernie Whitlock, the lonely Fire Island homosexual.

Gator     Burt Reynolds, 1976. Redneck faggot jokes.

The Gay Deceivers     Bruce Kesller, 1969. Larry Casey and Kevin Couglin avoid the draft by pretending to be queer - but they can’t hold a candle to Michael Greer’s flaming portrait of Malcolm.

The Gay Divorcee     Mark Sandrich, 1934. Edward Everett Horton as “Pinky.”

Georgia, Georgia     Stig Bjorkman, 1972. Roger Furman as the gay road manager of a famous singer.

Getting Straight     Richard Rush, 1970. Homophobic radicalism.

Gilda     Charles Vidor, 1946. Glenn Ford tells George Macready, “I was born the night you met me.”

Girlfriends     Claudia Weill, 1978. Lesbians as one of the hazards of feminist city living.

Girls in Prison     Edward Cahn, 1956. Helen Gilbert stalks Joan Taylor.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes     Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, 1961. Françoise Prevost and Marie Laforet as teacher and student with eyes for each other.

Gold      Peter Hunt, 1974. Bradford Dillman as a gay villain.

Grandma’s Boy     Fred Newmeyer, 1922. Harold Lloyd, sissy boy.

The Grasshopper     Jerry Paris, 1970. Jacqueline Bisset’s gay friends indicate how low she has sunk.

The Group     Sidney Lumet, 1966. Candice Bergen as Lakey.

Groupies     Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard, 1970. Gay groupies with dirty feet.

Hair     Milos Forman, 1979. Woof isn’t queer, though he wouldn’t throw Mick Jagger out of bed. The “White Boys” number is camp.

Happy Birthday Gemini     Richard Benner, 1980. An old-fashioned man accepts his gay son.

The Haunting     Robert Wise, 1963. Claire Bloom hugs Julie Harris - a lot.

Heat     Paul Morrissey, 1972. Sylvia Miles as a harpy with a lesbian child.

Hidden Pleasures     Eloy de la Iglesia, 1976. Powerful gay banker falls in love with straight boy and gets bashed.

High Infidelity     Franco Rossi, 1964. “The Scandal” episode, in which John Phillip Law flexes his muscle for Nino Manfredi.

The Hitler Gang     John Farrow, 1944. Hitler’s homosexual leanings are darkly hinted.

Honky Tonk Freeway     John Schlesinger, 1981. A jeep full of fags on the highway of life.

Horror Vacuii     Rosa von Praunheim, 1984. Neo-expressionist film about gay man trying to save his lover from a religious cult.

The Hospital     Arthur Hiller, 1971. A black homosexual welfare client.

The Hotel New Hampshire     Tony Richardson, 1984. Paul McCrane as another shy, lonely gay who never has sex.

The House on 92nd Street     Henry Hathaway, 1945. Signe Hasso in drag.

The Hunger     Tony Scott, 1983. Chic lesbian vampires Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve.

I Want What I Want     John Dexter, 1972. Anne Heywood cuts off her penis with a piece of broken glass.

If . . .     Lindsay Anderson, 1968. Lyric gay puppy love among rebel students. Enchanting.

The Iliac Passion     Gregory Markopoulos, 1967. Once-shocking homosexual passion.

Improper Conduct     Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez-Leal, 1984. Documentary about the fate of homosexuals in Castro’s Cuba.

In a Lonely Place     Nicholas Ray, 1950. Everyone but the screenwriter remembers a lesbian masseuse. Perhaps there should have been a lesbian masseuse.

In Cold Blood     Richard Brooks, 1967. Capote’s original references to gay relationship between two killers dropped.

Inside Daisy Clover     Robert Mulligan, 1966. Robert Redford as bisexual.

International House     Edward Sutherland, 1933. Franklin Pangborn as the hotel manager.

Irene     Alfred E. Green, 1926. George K. Arthur as Madame Lucy.

The Iron Man     Tod Browning, 1931. Lew Ayres and Robert Armstrong.

Irreconcilable Differences     Charles Shyer, 1984. Another gratuitous faggot secretary.

It Is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse But the Society in Which He Lives     Rosa von Praunheim, 1971. A Marxist harangue not without some political fascination.

It’s Love I’m After     Archie Mayo, 1937. Eric Blore at his best.

The Jackpot     Walter Lang, 1950. Alan Mowbray as an effeminate interior decorator.

Jacqueline Susann’s Once is Not Enough     Guy Green, 1975. A love affair between Melina Mercouri and Alexis Smith.

Joanna     Michael Sarne, 1968. Donald Sutherland as Baby Huey and a black gay, tolerated in an offhand but hip way.

Johnny Guitar     Nicholas Ray, 1954. Mercedes McCambridge and Joan Crawford square off.

Johnny Minotaur     Charles Henri Ford, 1971. The way some gay people were.

Just Imagine     David Butler, 1930. Fantasy of a future society where kings are queens.

Justine     George Cukor, 1969. Cliff Gorman as a vicious nellie faggot who dies with a hatpin in his neck.

Khartoum     Basil Dearden, 1966. Charlton Heston as a heterosexual version of General Charles Gordon.

The Killing of Sister George     Robert Aldrich, 1968. Beryl Reid and Susannah York are split by cobra-eyed Coral Browne.

King of Hearts     Philippe de Broca, 1966. The gay barber.

King Rat     Bryan Forbes, 1965. A sex change in the original became a transvestite on film.

Kiss of the Spider Woman     Hector Babenco, 1985. William Hurt won an Oscar as Molina, the homosexual prisoner who survives through recreating old movie fantasies.

Knightriders     George Romero, 1981. Motorcyclist Pippin is a troubled homosexual who finds true love.

The Kremlin Letter     John Huston, 1970. George Sanders in drag and a black lesbian spy for hire.

Lady of the Pavements     D. W. Griffith, 1929. Franklin Pangborn in an early sissy role.

Lady Scarface     Frank Woodruff, 1941. Judith Anderson is very butch as a gangster.

The Last Married Couple in America     Gilbert Cates, 1980. Steward Moss and Colby Chester as the happy homosexual couple down the street.

The Last Metro     Françoise Truffaut, 1980. Truffaut’s tale of a theater in occupied France points up homophobia as well as anti-Semitism.

The Last of Sheila     Herbert Ross, 1973. A gay film with a straight mentality.

The Laughing Polieman     Stuart Rosenberg, 1973. A gay killer on the loose in San Francisco.

Lawrence of Arabia     David Lean, 1962. Lawrence’s homosexuality and the rape scene both cut - after initial release.

The League of Gentlemen     Basil Dearden, 1960. Alan Bates as an effeminate dancer.

The Leather Boys     Sidney Furie, 1964. A homosexual buddy film.

The Legend of Lylah Clare     Robert Aldrich, 1968. Rosella Falk as a lesbian dope addict who has the hots for Kim Novak.

Lenny     Bob Fosse, 1974. Valerie Perrine has lesbian tendencies.

Lianna     John Sayles, 1983. Simple coming-out film suffers from lack of humor and vitality.

Liberty     Hal Roach, 1929. A very gay Laurel and Hardy.

Lilith     Robert Rossen, 1964. Lesbianism in a mental hospital.

The Lineup     Don Siegel, 1958. A misogynist heterosexual killer who is often misidentified as homosexual.

The Lion in Winter     Anthony Harvey, 1968. Geoffrey (Richard the Lion-Hearted) and the king of France.

Lisztomania     Ken Russell, 1975. The issue is the size of Franz Liszt’s (Roger Daltry’s) equpiment; no proof is offered.

Little Big Man     Arthur Penn, 1970. Robert Littlestar as Littlehorse, the gay Indian.

Live and Let Die     Guy Hamilton, 1973. The usual Bond cartoon dykes and faggots.

Logan’s Run     Michael Anderson, 1976. A society in which homosexuality is accepted as normal.

The Lonely Killers     Boris Szulzinger, 1972. Roland Maden and Dominique Rollin as gay mass murderers.

Lonesome Cowboys     Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, 1968. Taylor Mead is unforgettable, Franklin Pangborn’s only competition.

The Long Good Friday     John Mackenzie, 1979. Paul Freeman as the homosexual underworld lieutenant whose murder triggers a bloodbath.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar     Richard Brooks, 1977. Heterosexual promiscuity, but gays get the rap when psychopathic pickup (Tom Berenger) kills Diane Keaton.

Loot     Silvio Narizzano, 1971. From the play by Joe Orton.

Loss of Innocence (The Greengage Summer)     Lewis Gilbert, 1961. Danielle Darrieux and Claude Nollier are lesbian lovers.

The Lost Weekend     Billy Wilder, 1945. Homosexuality in the novel deleted onscreen.

Lot in Sodom     James Watson and Melville Webber, 1933. Stunning experimental film about a biblical city with glitter queens running the show.

Love and Death     Woody Allen, 1975. “I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer?”

The Loved One     Tony Richardson, 1965. Liberace plays a flaming homosexual casket salesman. Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy.

The L-Shaped Room     Bryan Forbes, 1962. Brock Peters as gay jazz musician and Cicely Cortneidge as lesbian song-and-dance woman.

Ludwig     Luchino Visconti, 1972. Sleeping with a stable boy rots your teeth.

Luv     Clive Donner, 1967. Fag jokes.

Mädchen in Uniform     Leontine Sagan, 1931. Classic Christa Winsloe story of young girl in love with her teacher.

The Magic Christian     Joseph McGrath, 1970. Homophobia runs rampant as Yul Brynner dons drag.

Magnum Force     Ted Post, 1973. Clint Eastwood battles fascist policemen who seem sexually interested in each other.

Mahogany     Berry Gordy, 1975. Tony Perkins as a fashion photographer.

Making Love     Arthur Hiller, 1982. Hollywood’s landmark film about a man who leaves his wife for another man was too blow-dried to please many people.

Mala Noche     Gus Van Sant, 1986. Gritty, authentic, low-budget film about a gay man in love with a Mexican migrant.

The Maltese Falcon     John Huston, 1941. Peter Lorre as joel Cairo and Elisha Cook, Jr., as the gunsel.

Manhattan     Woody Allen, 1979. Meryl Streep leaves Woody for another woman.

A Man Like Eva     Radu Gabrea, 1985. Brilliant, operatic evocation of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with a sensational impersonation by Eva Mattes.

Manslaughter     Cecil B. De Mille, 1922. Two lesbians kissing in orgy scene.

The Man Who Fell to Earth     Nicholas Roeg, 1976. Buck Henry as a gay lawyer.

Mara     Angela Linders, 1985. Cerebral hogwash about a woman soul-searching in Lisbon.

Marathon Man     John Schlesinger, 1976. Lover relationship between Roy Scheider and William Devane characters not retained in film version of William Goldman’s novel.

Marjoe     Howard Smith and Sara Kernochan, 1971. Fundamentalist homophobia as theater from the preacher who wanted to be Mick Jagger.

M*A*S*H*     Robert Altman, 1970. A good lay cures a sudden case of homosexuality.

Mass Appeal     Glenn Jordan, 1984. Fraudulent claptrap posing as strong stuff about young priest admitting homosexual affair.

Maurice     James Ivory, 1987. Merchant Ivory Production based on the Forster novel, projected for spring of 1987.

Meatballs Part II     Ken Wiederhorn, 1984. John Larroquette as a closeted gay assistant to military commandant.

The Mechanic     Michael Winner, 1972. A male love story is submerged in the relationship between characters played by Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent.

The Member of the Wedding     Fred Zinnermann, 1953. Frankie Adams is a forerunner of Rita Mae Brown’s Molly Bolt.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence     Nagisa Oshima, 1983. Homoeroticism in prisoner-of-war camp.

Midnight Cowboy     John Schlesinger, 1969. Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as Times Square lovers; assorted “real” homosexuals as lovers and freaks.

Midnight Express     Alan Paker, 1978. A falsification of Billy Hayes’ book about his experiences in a Turkish prison.

Mike’s Murder     James Bridges, 1982. Paul Winfield as sympathetic straightforward gay businessman.

Mishima     Paul Schrader, 1985. A tedious mess about the notorious Japanese sadomasochistic writer.

Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers     Roscoe Arbuckle, 1915. Arbuckle in bathing beauty drag.

The Missouri Breaks     Arthur Penn, 1976. Brando in drag. He told the press, “Like many men, I too have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed.”

Modesty Blaise     Joseph Losey, 1966. Unwatchable thriller with Dirk Bogarde as effeminate killer.

Mona Lisa     Neil Jordan, 1986. Cathy Tyson as the prostitute in love with a young hooker.

Monsieur Beaucaire     Sidney Alcott, 1924. Valentino, by acclamation.

More and More Love     Koshi Shimada, 1984. Bizarre story of young Japanese rock star who becomes obsessed with fear of AIDS. Very daring for Japan.

Morocco     Josef von Sternberg, 1930. Marlene Dietrich in tails. Lesbian tease.

Movie Crazy     Clyde Bruckman, 1932. Grady Sutton is a sissy.

La Muerte de Mikel     Imanol Uribe, 1984. Unusual film from Spain in which a man falls in love with a drag queen and is murdered by his own mother.

Murder     Alfred Hitchcock, 1939. Esme Percy as a trapeze artist transvestite killer.

Murder by Death     Bob Moore, 1976. Peter Falk as a closet queen for laughs.

The Music Lovers     Ken Russell, 1971. If you love your mother, you’ll be a homosexual - but you won’t like it.

My Beautiful Laundrette     Stephen Frears, 1986. A movie about class, race and sexuality in Britain today. One of the few films to use incidentally homosexual characters. Has spawned a chain of laundromats named after the film.

My Brilliant Career     Gillian Armstrong, 1979. Nobody could understand Sybylla’s adamant refusal to marry handsome Harry Beecham and with good reason. This beautiful but fraudulent story omits the real-life lesbianism of the heroine.

My Hustler     Andy Warhol, 1965. Fire Island and boring blond people.

Myra Breckinridge     Michael Sarne, 1970. Rex Reed wakes up in a hospital bed and screams, “My tits! Where are my tits?”

New York After Midnight     Jacques Scandalari, unreleased. A woman kills gay men when she discovers her husband is queer.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village     Paul Mazurksy, 1976. Antonio Fargas as Bernstein the depressed faggot.

Night and Day     Michael Curtiz, 1946. The musical bio of a gay composer, but you’d never know it. And Monty Woolley too.

Nighthawks     Ron Peck and Paul Hallam, 1978. The gay bar syndrome from a gay perspective; insightful and moving.

The Night of the Iguana     John Huston, 1964. Grayson Hall as Miss Fellowes.

Night Shift     Ron Howard, 1982. Effeminate homosexual prison inmate.

Nijinsky     Herbert Ross, 1980. A mess about a famous dancer. The homosexuality is “handled.”

No Exit     Tad Danielewski, 1962. Rita Gam and Viveca Lindors play tormented women involved in a sexually ambiguous relationship.

Norman, Is That You?     George Schlatter, 1976. The old folks find out Junior is a tinkerbelle.

No Small Affair     Jerry Schatzberg, 1985. Nerdy photography bug accused of homosexuality by his classmates.

Novembermoon     Alexandra von Grote, 1985. Lesbian love story set in occupied France.

No Way to Treat a Lady     Jack Smight, 1968. Rod Steiger as a “homo” hairdresser killer.

Odds Against Tomorrow     Robert Wise, 1959. Does a homosexual really try to pick up Harry Belafonte in a park?

Ode to Billy Joe     Max Baer, 1976. Now we know why Billy Joe jumped.

The Old Dark House     James Whale, 1932. A gay horror film.

Olivia (Pit of Loneliness)     Jacqueline Audry, 1951. Lace-curtain lesbos in a girls’ school in Paris.

Once Bitten     Howard Storm, 1985. Viciously offensive teen comedy of vampire Lauren Hutton and her faggot servant Cleavon Little.

Once Upon a Time in the East     André Brassard, 1974. Superb film about gay life in the East End of Montreal. Has not had a commercial run in America.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest     Milos Forman, 1975. Two gay mental patients.

Only When I Laugh     Glenn Jordan, 1981. James coco as the gay best friend of alcoholic actress Marsha Mason.

Only Yesterday     John Stahl, 1933. Franklin Pangborn with a boyfriend.

Open City     Roberto Rossellini, 1945. Maria Michi seduced by lesbian Giovanna Galletti.

Opera do Melandro     Ruy Guerra, 1987. Brazilian Guys and Dolls imitates old MGM musicals. Basically harmless singing and dancing gangsters - and the only character who really gets killed is the faggot.

Outrageous!     Richard Benner, 1977. A gay A Star Is Born that works (unlike Streisand’s).

The Palm Beach Story     Preson Sturges, 1942. Franklin Pangborn.

Pandora’s Box     G. W. Pabst, 1929. Alice Roberts as the Countess Geschwitz.

Papillon     Franklin Schaffner, 1973. Gay predators in prison.

Parting Glances     Bill Sherwood, 1986. Superbly written and directed independent film that captures gay life in New York in the 1980s.

Partners     James Burrows, 1982. Mindless garbage about cops pretending to live as a gay couple to catch a murderer.

The Pawnbroker     Sidney Lumet, 1965. Brock Peters as a homosexual pimp.

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure     Tim Burton, 1985. A classic example of an entirely gay film in which there is no homosexuality whatever.

A Perfect Couple     Robert Altman, 1979. A happy, well-adjusted lesbian couple played by Meredith McRae and Tomi-Lee Bradley.

Performance     Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, 1970. Nonsense about androgynous Mick Jagger and gangster James Fox switching roles, misinterpreted as significant by the hippie mentality.

Persona     Ingmar Bergman, 1966. Lesbian passion in slow motion.

Personal Best     Robert Towne, 1982. Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly fall in love while training for the Olympics. Another in a long line of films that are “not really about lesbians.”

Pete ‘n’ Tillie     Martin Ritt, 1972. René Auberjonois as one of the girls.

Petulia     Richard Lester, 1968. Richard Chamberlain as a wife beater who likes little boys.

Pink Flamingos     John Waters, 1972. A truly gay film though it hasn’t much to do with homosexuality. A subplot has kidnapped children being sold to lesbian couples from the suburbs. And, of course, there is Divine.

Pixote     Hector Babenco, 1981. Devastating film about the cruelties of street life for abandoned children in Brazil. Two of the kids are gay.

P.J.     John Guillermin, 1968. George Peppard fights the fairies.

Play it as it Lays     Frank Perry, 1972. Tony Perkins as a suicidal gay. Again.

Police Academy     Hugh Wilson, 1984; Police Academy 2     Jerry Paris, 1985. Leather boys dancing the tango at the Blue Oyster gay bar. Also in the sequel. The tango?

Porky’s     Bob Clark, 1981. Plus endless sequels, all featuring dyke gym teacher and fag jokes.

Portrait of Jason     Shirley Clarke, 1967. Two hours of Jason Holliday is like a month in another country. An interview with a hustler.

Power     Sidney Lumet, 1986. Reflects casual heterosexual interest in AIDS as potential gossip and nothing more.

Prick Up Your Ears     Stephen Frears, 1987. Biography of Joe Orton based on John Lahr’s book.

The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover     Larry Cohen, 1978. Crude but fascinating look at Hoover; says his hangup was sex in general.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes     Billy Wilder, 1970. Gay Sherlock.

Privates on Parade     Michael Blakemore, 1982. Bitter satirical farce featuring gays in wartime. Regional British humor, not for everyone.

The Producers     Mel Brooks, 1968. Christopher Hewitt as a flaming fag - defended by Richard Schickel, who compared his condition to a withered arm and called for compassion.

Protocol     Herbert Ross, 1984. Herb Ross brings himself to treat Goldie Hawn’s two gay roommates like human beings.

Puzzle of a Downfall Child     Jerry Schazberg, 1970. Viveca Lindfors plays a sophisticated, predatory lesbian fashion designer. Again.

The Queen     Frank Simon, 1968. A drag contest at Town Hall; Miss Crystal rides again.

Queen Christina     Rouben Mamoulian, 1933. Garbo.

Rachel, Rachel     Paul Newman, 1968. Estelle Parsons as a psalm-singing lesbian spinster.

Radio Days     Woody Allen, 1987. Robert Joy as the gay suitor of Dianne Wiest.

Raiders of the Lost Ark     Steven Spielberg, 1981. A gay student drops an apple on Harrison Ford’s desk in opening sequence. Nice touch.

The Razor’s Edge     Edmund Goulding, 1946. Clifton Webb’s death scene.

Rebecca     Alfred Hitchcock, 1940. Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers.

The Rebels: Montgomery Clift     1985. Documentary produced by RAI, Italian television, which deals extensively with Clift’s homosexuality and the interesting homophobic reactions of his alleged best friends.

Rebel Without a Cause     Nicholas Ray, 1955. Sal Mineo as Plato.

Red River     Howard Hawks, 1948. A cowboy love story.

Reflections in a Golden Eye     John Huston, 1967. Marlon Brando and Zorro David act equally homosexual.

Reform School Girls     Tom DeSimone, 1986. Wendy O. Williams as the leather-clad lesbian who rules the roost.

Rich and Famous     George Cukor, 1981. A film that is homosexual in ways that have little do with its content. Elicited homophobic reaction from various bigoted critics.

Riot     Buzz Kulik, 1969. James Brown faces a tough prison queen.

The Ritz     Richard Lester, 1976. A Cleveland garbage man in a gay bathhouse.

The Road Warrior     George Miller, 1981. Barbarian punk homosexuals threaten the survival of the family.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show     Jim Sharman, 1976. Revolutionary film starring Tim Curry as a sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania.

Rope     Alfred Hitchcock, 1948. John Dall and Farley Granger as a gay couple who murder a former classmate.

The Rose     Mark Rydell, 1978. Janis Joplin given lesbian panic.

Rustler’s Rhapsody     Hugh Wilson, 1985. Comedy about heterosexual panic that backfires, becoming simplistic and offensive.

Sailor’s Luck     Raoul Walsh, 1933. Gay bathhouse attendant.

St. Elmo’s Fire     Joel Schumacher, 1985. Tired, cliché-ridden brat pack script in which homosexuals are less than human.

Saint Jack     Peter Bogdanovich, 1979. George Lazenby as a gay senator.

Salo     Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975. Fascist sexual degradation.

Salome     Charles Bryant, 1923. Nazimova’s tribute to Oscar Wilde.

Saturday Night Fever at the Baths     David Buckley, 1975. Young man toys with bisexuality. Queen for a day. Condescending.

Saturday Night Fever     John Badlham, 1977. John Travolta doesn’t taunt the faggot.

Satyricon     Federico Fellini, 1969. Fellini says he cast an American and an Englishman in the leads because “there are no homosexuals in Italy.”

Scarecrow     Jerry Schatzberg,1973. Richard Lynch as the sadistic gay rapist.

Score     Radley Metzger, 1973. Bisexuality comes to town as the latest thing.

Scorpio Rising     Kenneth Anger, 1963. Little Peggy March and a homosexual orgy. There has never been anything like it, before or since.

Screaming Mimi     Gerd Oswald, 1958. Anita Ekberg gets attention from a lesbian character.

Sebastiane     Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress, 1976. The martyrdom of St. Sebastian according to nobody.

A Separate Peace     Larry Pierce, 1972. An Ivy League love story.

Serial     Bill Persky, 1980. Pea-brained homophobic twaddle about swinging singles in Marin County, California.

Serious Charge     Terrence Young, 1959. British film about a priest charged by a young boy with homosexuality.

The Sergeant     John Flynn, 1968. Steiger kisses John Phillip Law and shoots himself.

The Servant     Joseph Losey, 1963. James Fox and Dirk Bogarde as slave and master.

Seven Sinners     Tay Garnett, 1940. Bruce in Bombay is the last straw.

Seven Women     John Ford, 1966. Margaret Leighton as a lesbian spinster.

Shampoo     Hal Ashby, 1975. Not all hairdressers are gay.

She Done Him Wrong     Lowell Sherman, 1933. Two gay prisoners - the Cherry Sisters.

Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York     Sidney Furie, 1975. A sex-starved lesbian proves that living in New York is dangerous for single women.

Siege (Self Defense)     Paul Donovan, 1981. A splatter film about anti-homosexual thugs who slaughter the patrons of a gay bar.

Silent Movie     Mel Brooks, 1976. The usual Brooks sissy jokes.

Silent Pioneers     Lucy Winer, 1985. Moving documentary about gay senior citizens.

Silkwood     Mike Nichols, 1983. Virtually the only mainstream Hollywood film with an intelligently integrated lesbian character to appear in the last decade.

The Sinners (Au royaume des cieux)     Julien Duvivier, 1949. Nadine Basile as a dyke prisoner has “men” tattooed on one leg and “women” on the other.

Sleeper    Woody Allen, 1973. A gay robot.

The Soilers     Hal Roach, 1923. Stan Laurel and a gay cowboy.

Some Kind of Hero     Michael Pressman, 1982. Homosexuality removed from James Kirkwood novel for the screen.

Some Like It Hot    Billy Wilder, 1959. Jack Lemmon has a good time in drag.

Some of My Best Friends Are . . .     Mervyn Nelson, 1971. Grand Hotel in a gay bar on Christmas Eve.

Something for Everyone     Hal Prince, 1970. Anthony Corlan and Michael York play star-crossed lovers.

Spartacus     Stanley Kubrick, 1960. Crassius (Laurence Olivier), Antoninus (Tony Curtis) and the oysters.

A Special Day     Ettore Scola, 1977. Marcell Mastroianni; another Different Story.

Spies Like Us     John Landis, 1985. Moronic fag humor.

Staircase     Stanley Donen, 1969. Rex Harrison and Richard Burton as depressing kvetches.

Star!     Robert Wise, 1968. Daniel Massey as Noel Coward.

A Star is Born     George Cukor, 1954. “It’s the Downbeat club at two in the morning and you’re singing for yourself and for the boys in the band.”

Star Spangled Rhythm     George Marshall, 1942. “If Men Played Cards as Women Do.”

Staying Alive     Sylvester Stallone, 1983. John Travolta replaces gay dancer in Broadway show.

Strange Cargo     Frank Borzage, 1940. John Arledge and Albert Dekker (who was found dead in drag in 1968).

A Strange Love Affair     Eric de Kuyper, 1985. Beautifully photographed but strangely unmoving meditation on lost love.

The Strange One     Jack Garfein, 1957. Paul Richards as Cockroach and Ben Gazzara as Jocko DeParis.

Strangers on a Train     Alfred Hitchcock, 1951. Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony.

Streamers     Robert Altman, 1983. Metaphorical drama linking Vietnam-bound soldiers with their images of death, madness and homosexuality.

Suddenly Last Summer     Joseph Mankiewicz, 1959. Tennessee Williams tale of madness, cannibalism and you know what.

Summer Wishes, winter Dreams     Gilbert Cates, 1973. Ron Rickards.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday     John Schlesinger, 1971. Peter Finch as Dr. Daniel Hirsch and Murray Head as his lover.

Swashbuckler     James Goldstone, 1976. Peter Boyle as a pederast pirate.

Sylvia     Gordon Douglas, 1965. Viveca Lindfors again. As the lesbian librarian.

The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three     Josseph Sargent, 1974. A gay subway passenger.

The Tamarind Seed     Blake Edwards, 1974. Dan O’Herlihy as the gay British minister in Paris.

A Taste of Honey     Tony Richardson, 1961. Murray Melvin as a shy gay guy.

Taxi zum Klo     Frank Riploh, 1980. Refreshingly honest autobiographical comedy of promiscuity. The first post-gay liberation film.

Tea and Sympathy     Vincente Minnelli, 1956. Be kind to shy heterosexuals.

Teen Wolf     Rod Daniel, 1985. unnecessary faggot references comparing gays unfavorably with werewolves.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon     Otto Preminger, 1970. Bob Moore as Warren and Leonard Frey as his gay “father.”

10     Blake Edwards, 1979. Dudley Moore’s best friend loses his beach boy and ends up with the blues.

Tenderness of the Wolves     Ulli Lommel, 1973. A true story about a gay vampire.

Tenue de soirée (Ménage)     Bertrand Blier, 1986. Droll sexual comedy with the most offensive ad campaign in memory.

Teorema     Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968. Terence Stamp as a pansexual angel.

Thank God It’s Friday     Robert Klane, 1978. Disco is heterosexual music.

Thank You, Masked Man     Lenny Bruce, 1967. Animated. The Lone Ranger and Tonto.

That Certain Summer     Lamont Johnson, 1973. Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen in a pioneer televsion film.

Theatre of Blood     Douglas Hickox, 1973. Robert Morley as an effete drama critic.

Therese and Isabelle     Radley Metzger, 1968. Softcore lesbianism.

These Three     William Wyler, 1936. Sanitized version of The Children’s Hour.

They Only Kill Their Masters     James Goldstone, 1972. June Allyson as a lesbian killer.

The Third Sex     Frank Winterstein, 1959. A young man is cured of homosexuality by his mother.

This Special Friendship     Jean Delannoy, 1964. Love story.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot     Michael Cimino, 1974. Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges play a preacher and a transvestite, crooks in love.

The Times of Harvey Milk     Robert Epstein, 1985. Academy Award-winning documentary about the slain San Francisco city supervisor.

Times Square     Allan Moyle, 1980. Rock and roll fable featuring unclear relationship between two young women. Many people see subtextual lesbianism here.

To an Unknown God     Jaime Chavarri, 1977. A gay magician is obsessed by García Lorca.

To Be or Not To Be     Alan Johnson, 1983. Remake of 1942 Lubitsch classic about troupe of actors fighting Nazis in occupied Poland. Poignant gay character played by James Haake.

To Forget Venice (Dimenticare Venezia)     Franco Brusati, 1979. On growing up gay.

To Live and Die in L.A.     William Friedkin, 1985. Muddled lesbian mini-plot is almost an afterthought.

Tommy     Ken russell, 1975. Uncle Ernie reads Gay News.

Tony Rome     Gordon Douglas, 1967. Lloyd Bockner as Rood, the gay junkie; a pathetic lesbian alcoholic and her stripper lover.

Tootsie     Sydney Pollack, 1982. Overrated comedy with Dustin Hoffman in drag raising bogus lesbian panic in Jessica Lange during love scenes.

Touch of Evil     Orson Welles, 1958. Mercedes McCambridge as a motorcyle tough.

Tough Guys     Jeff Kanew, 1986. Kirk Douglas gets out of jail to discover his favorite saloon is a gay bar.

Trash     Paul Morrissey, 1970. Michael Sklar and Holly Woodlawn fight over shoes.

Tunnelvision     Brad Swirnoff, 1976. Sophomoric fag jokes.

Turnabout     Hal Roach, 1940. A role-reversal comedy with gay undertones.

The Turning Point     Herbert Ross, 1977. There are no homosexuals in ballet - especially not Baryshnikov.

2001: A Space Odyssey     Stanley Kubrick, 1968. HAL says, “Happy Birthday, Hank.”

An Unmarried Woman     Paul Mazursky, 1978. The character of Jill Clayburgh’s therapist was a lesbian in the original screenplay.

Valentino     Ken Russell, 1977. Well, was he or wasn’t he?

Valley of the Dolls     Mark Robson, 1967. Ted Casablanca the fag designer, played by Alex Davion.

A Very Natural Thing     Christopher Larkin, 1973. The first nonporno film about gay relationships.

A Very Special Favor     Michael Gordon, 1965. Homosexuality as a curable neurosis.

Victim     Basil Dearden, 1961. Blackmail thriller about homosexuals.

The Victors     Carl Foreman, 1963. Scenes deleted showing male prostitute.

Victor/Victoria     Blake Edwards, 1982. Occasionally funny farce with great performance by Robert Preston as Toddy but in the end timid and very straight.

A View from the Bridge     Sidney Lumet, 1962. Homosexuality as a false accusation.

Villain     Michael Tuchner, 1971. Richard burton as Vic Dakin.

Vision Quest     Harold Becker, 1985. Hotel guest tries to put the make on room service waiter Matthew Modine.

Walk on the Wild Side     Edward Dmytryk, 1962. Barbar Stanwyck as Jo, Capucine as Hallie.

The Warrior’s Husband     Walter Lang, 1933. Ernest Truex.

The War Widow     Harvey Perr, 1976. Televsion story of a lesbian love affair.

Westler - West of the Wall     Wieland Speck, 1986. Two lovers divided by the Berlin Wall. Atmospheric personal vision.

What Have I Done to Deserve This?     Pedro Almodovar, 1984. Riotous black comedy from Spain about wacky family including gay teenager sold to local dentist by glue-sniffing mother.

The Wheeler Dealers     Arthur Hill, 1963. Assorted fairy decorators and queer art critics.

Where’s Poppa?     Carl Reiner, 1970. George Segal’s brother rapes a cop in drag and the cop sends him flowers.

Who Killed Teddy Bear?     Joseph Cates, 1965. Elaine Stritch a lesbian victim.

Why Bring That Up?     George Abbott, 1929. Two gay men in backstage sequence.

The Wild Party     Dorothy Arzner, 1929. Intimations of sorority lesbianism.

The Wild Party     James Ivory, 1975. Decadent Hollywood lesbians. Gay men play the piano at parties.

Windows     Gordon Willis, 1980. A psychotic lesbian killer played by Elizabeth Ashley.

Without a Trace     Stanley Jaffe, 1983. Keith McDermott as Philippe, the houseboy falsely suspected of kidnapping.

The Wizard of Oz     Victor Fleming, 1939. Bert Lahr.

A Woman Like Eve     Nouchka von Brakel, 1982. A variation on John Sales’ Lianna with a less politically correct but more believable outcome.

The Woman Next Door     François Truffaut, 1981. A publisher and his young boyfriend are incidental characters, typical of Truffaut’s ecumenism.

Woman of the Year     George Stevens, 1942. Hepburn’s male secretary.

A Woman’s Face     George Cukor, 1941. Two lesbians dancing, but Cukor doesn’t remember.

Women in Love     Ken Russell, 1969. Nude wrestling between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed.

Wonder Bar     Lloyd Bacon, 1934. Two gay men dance a waltz in a nightclub.

Won Ton Ton     Michael Winner, 1976. Ron Leibman plays a gay Valentino.

Word is Out     Mariposa Film Group, 1977. Stunning documentary on gays in America.

The World According to Garp     George Roy Hill, 1982. John Lithgow makes transsexual Roberta Muldoon a vibrant, three-dimensional character.

X, Y & Zee     Brian Hutton, 1971. Elizabeth Taylor does it with Susannah York.

Yankee Doodle in Berlin     Richard F. Jones, 1918. An early drag comedy.

The Year of Living Dangerously     Peter Weir, 1983. Noel Ferrier as Wally Sullivan, the Australian journalist with an Indonesian boyfriend.

Young Man with a Horn     Michael Curtiz, 1950. Lauren Bacall as Amy North.

Young Torless     Volker Schlöndorff, 1966. Homosexuality and violence in prep school.

Z     Constantin Costa-Gavras, 1969. A fascist killer who just happens to be gay.

Zachariah     George Englund, 1971. A rock buddy wester epic.

Zéro de conduite     Jean Vigo, 1933. The forerunner of If . . .

Zorro, The Gay Blade     Peter Medak, 1981. A swishbuckler. Not quite funny enough but inoffensive.

Zwei Welten (Two Worlds)     Gustaf Gründgens, 1940. Adventure story of two boys and two girls dubbed “a clever homosexual charade.”

[kemetic-dreams]

Ronald Dyson (June 5, 1950 – November 10, 1990) was an American soul and R&B singer and actor.

Early career

Born in Washington, D.C., Dyson grew up in Brooklyn, New York where he sang in church choirs. At just 18 years of age, he won a lead role in the Broadway production of Hair, debuting in New York in 1968. Dyson became an iconic voice of the 1960s with the lead vocal in the show's anthem of the hippie era, "Aquarius". It is Dyson's voice leading off the song and opening the show with the famous lyric "When the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars..." He made a cameo appearance in the 1979 motion picture version of "Hair", singing "3-5-0-0" with another "Hair" alumnus, Melba Moore.

Later career

Dyson also appeared in the 1969 film Putney Swope.

After Hair, Dyson pursued his stage career with a role in Salvation in 1970. His recording of a song from the Salvation score, "(If You Let Me Make Love to You Then) Why Can't I Touch You?", successfully launched his record career, breaking into the Top 10 of the US Billboard Hot 100 record chart, peaking at number eight in 1970. The follow-up, "I Don't Wanna Cry", was a strong US R&B seller, climbing to number nine.

In 1971, "When You Get Right Down To It", of which his was a more dramatic cover version of a song that had been a hit the previous year for the Delfonics, made the US charts, and reached number 34 on the UK Singles Chart in December that year.

His record company, Columbia Records, sent him to Philadelphia in 1973 to be produced by Thom Bell, one of the premier producers of the day, for several tracks. Bell's highly orchestrated style suited Dyson with hits including "One Man Band (Plays All Alone)", which reached number 28 on the Hot 100 and number 15 on the R&B chart, and "Just Don't Want to Be Lonely" peaking at number 60 on the Hot 100 and number 29 on the R&B chart. These appeared on an album which was also made up of re-mixes of some earlier recordings, including "When You Get Right Down To It".

Dyson remained with Columbia working with top-line producers for another three albums, The More You Do It (1976), Love in All Flavors (1977) and If The Shoe Fits (1979). The title track of the first of the three resulted in one of the singer's biggest-selling records, reaching number six on the R&B chart. It was produced by Charles "Chuck" Jackson (half brother of Jesse Jackson and no relation to the more famous singer of the same name who recorded for the same company in the 1960s) and Marvin Yancy, who had been responsible for successfully launching the career of Natalie Cole with a series of hits. (Jackson and Yancy had also produced hits for a Chicago soul group, The Independents, with whom Jackson was also lead singer.)

In 1986, Dyson also provided the vocals for the song "Nola" on the She's Gotta Have It soundtrack.

Dyson then moved to an Atlantic Records subsidiary label, the Cotillion Records label, in 1981 for two albums and several singles which were only moderately successful. His acting and singing career had begun to stall in the late 1970s due to ill health, and it was in 1983 that Dyson appeared on the R&B chart for the last time on Cotillion with "All Over Your Face". His final solo recording was "See The Clown" in 1990.

Death

Dyson died at the age of 40 from heart failure on November 10, 1990, in Brooklyn, New York.

Legacy

A posthumous release on Society Hill Records appeared in 1991, when a duet with Vicki Austin, "Are We So Far Apart (We Can't Talk Anymore)", dented the US R&B chart, reaching number 79 during a five-week run.

[jyou-no-sonoko19]

I guess I should tell my Goncharov origin story because honestly I took one hell of a route.

The first thing you need to know is that (unsurprisingly) Gonch was huge in Japan, known as ゴンチャロブ: 憂鬱な冬 (”Goncharov: Melancholic Winter”). 

The second thing you need to know is that I first came across the film in a drive-sharing LAN at some point early in uni (this was eDonkey/eMULE days, very early 2000s), which was mostly anime but a bunch of live action films made it in too. And it was a dub.

A very brief history of the Gonch in Japan: December 1973: Theatrical release  November 1983: 10 year anniversary of the film, released on ~*~laserdisc~*~, with a very functional, stock-standard dub. Then came December 1997, DVDs were very shiny and very new, and distributors were clambering for the titles to re-release and motivate regular people to spend that sort of money when their video tapes seemed perfectly fine.

The folks behind the laserdisc release had bellied-up, and Osaka’s SukinaBANG! (who mostly put out dubbed Spaghetti Westerns at the time) picked up the rights and put in a ton of effort on re-dubbing, using popular voices in the 90s pop and anime scene. Including Kaoru Akimoto -- yes, as in “Dress Down” Kaoru Akimoto! -- who was cast as Sofia. And you’d best believe that meant she wrote a brand new song to tie-in to the release of the dub. 

And the thing is, they didn’t just put a different track over the credits. Anything throughout the film that could properly be called a song was replaced, with glorious abandon. I mean, it’s no more anachronistic than the original, right? When you get down to the nitt and the gritt? It’s not like there was an entire lack of synths used in “Mia Cara Sposa”, now was there?

Anyway, long story short, the first (second, third, etc) time I saw The Tango Scene, they were dancing to an incredible electro-pop number called “BE MY BABY”, which Akimoto released as an extremely limited single, available through Tower Records (apparently stock didn’t make it far outside of Tokyo, so pretty much the Shinjuku/ Shibuya/ Ikebukuro hub) paired with the DVD. And when I tell you that song haunts my dreams to this day...

“Be my baby, soko ni odotteru! Be my baby, kono yoru, owatteru!”

It charges me rent at this point. And when I finally saw the scene in English it was like... a) okay well this is an EXTREMELY DIFFERENT VIBE, and b) you’re telling me the original song is basically revealing the entire finale, while I was over here singing about how the champagne is sparkling off the dark waters of the bay??

And honestly? I recommend this experience. It’s not the first time I’ve watched a film/series dubbed before the original, and it gives a really interesting dual experience, because you get to see it through a foreign interpretation first -- the difference in archetypes/ voice casting across cultures is hugely interesting! -- and then go into the original as if it’s just another version, it doesn’t hold the same ‘holy’ weight to it, and I think that’s neat. Especially with a film as culturally distinct as Goncharov.

[redaynia]

ANOTHER COUNTRY: THE 1980s AND GAY CINEMA

by Alex Davidson

My Beautiful Laundrette, with its positive representation of a gay relationship, came at a radical time for LGBT rights in the UK and stands in the tradition of queer cinema flourishing in times of homophobic oppression. Victim (1961), Basil Dearden's drama about a lawyer (Dirk Bogarde) who realises his own homosexuality while investigating blackmail attempts against gay men, was made when homosexuality was still completely illegal in the UK. The sympathetic portrayal may have helped pave the way for a partial decriminalisation following the Sexual Offences act in 1967.

Gay Liberation flourished in the late 1970s and gay men on British cinema screens, who conventionally ended up miserable or dead by the end credits, started having fun. While Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1967), an erotically charged take on the life and execution of St Sebastian, ended in tragedy, there was no doubting the film's gleeful celebration of gay sex. Nighthawks (1978) took British audiences into the gay clubs of Lindon and divided gay audiences, some of whom felt the main character -- sensitively played by Ken Robertson -- was an unappealing and downbeat figure. The film remains, however, an invaluable time capsule of 1970s gay nightlife. Television was more problematic, with TV schedules plagued by tired stereotypes typified by John Inman in Are You Being Served? (1973-1985) and Larry Grayson -- both, however, familiar, beloved faces on the small screen. The Naked Civil Servant (1975) was more provocative, with a Bafta-winning performance by John Hurt as the unashamedly flamboyant Quentin Crisp making a genuinely subversive statement.

With Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power in 1979 came a lurch to the right and a darkening of attitudes towards LGBT people in the 1980s. As the Aids epidemic spread, tabloids became bolder in their homophobia, with The Sun under the editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie calling Aids a 'gay plague'. Groups such as OutRage! and Act Up protested at the government's slow response to tackling the virus, noting how homophobia informed political decision-making. However, some progress was made. During the 1970s, Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun had been deselected after being as outed as gay by the press, and when Peter Tatchell stood as a Labour candidate for Bermondsey in 1983 he face a notoriously homophobic campaign from his Liberal opponents (the seat was won by the Liberals' Simon Hughes, who later came out as bisexual). Yet in 1984, Labour MP Chris Smith was the first minister to come out while in office. More LGBT people became politically active, such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), who inspired the award-winning film Pride (2014).

The most famous instance of the Thatcher administration's homophobic policy-making arrived in 1988, when Section 28 of the Local Government Act was passed. This legislation banned local authorities from publishing 'material with the intention of promoting homosexuality' as well as 'the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.' The law directly affected The Two of Us (1988), a mild BBC drama about two gay boys who must decide whether to leave their homophobic home town or stay and resort to conformity. The original had the boys continue their relationship but the broadcast version was changed: one headed back to heterosexuality, while the other is left alone. British filmmakers were quick to react to the wave of hostility that dominated the decade. Derek Jarman made unashamedly celebratory films about gay male lives in The Angelic Conversation (1985) -- a queer reading of Shakespeare sonnets addressed to a young man -- and Caravaggio (1986), a queered portrait of the renaissance painter. His 1989 experimental film The Last of England (1989) is a dark, poetic vision of a country in crisis and one of his most explicitly anti-Thatcherite films.

Production company Merchant Ivory has a (misleading) reputation for safe period dramas but its adaptation of EM Forster's Maurice (1987) was daring -- not because it was politically confrontational but because it had that rarest thing in 1980s gay cinema: a happy ending for its lovers. A further key British feature of the era is Another Country (1984), based on the early life of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess and starring Rupert Everett as a gay public schoolboy disgusted by his repressive environment. In both Maurice and Another Country, the protagnists are rich, white and male -- acceptable traits for audiences who had already embraced homoeroticism in the BBC's 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. All three works were comfortably set in the past, as was Stephen Frears' follow-up to My Beautiful Laundrette, his admirably bawdy Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears (1987). This fondness for telling gay stories through the distancing lens of period drama makes the contemporary love story of My Beautiful Laundrette all the more urgent.

Gay British films with interracial relationships were scant. A heavy hint of homosexual attraction followed the titular black and white characters in Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), while the silly but lovable Girl Stroke Boy (1971) gave audiences a couple, played by Clive Francis and Peter Straker, where the gender of one half of the relation was supposedly ambiguous, but gay love stories featuring black and Asian characters appeared less frequently in the early 1980s. The political significance of an interracial gay relationship in a London blighted by the National Front adds fire to My Beautiful Laundrette and, despite the mildness of the scenes of passion, the film sparked controversy; when it was shown in New York, the Pakistan Action Committee demonstrated against it as 'the product of a vile and perverted mind'. Kureishi explored race and homosexuality again in his TV adaptation of his own novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1993) and interracial love informed some of the most interesting queer stories of the 1990s, in Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels (1991) and Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992).

While Queer as Folk (1999) may be the most famous LGBT British TV series of past years, a handful of gay non-fiction series from the 1980s paved the way for its success. Gay Life (1980-1981) explored queerness in various contexts, while the delightfully right-on Six of Hearts (1986) offered docudrama profiles of gay men and women, most notable Andy the Furniture Maker, an unlikely star of the art underworld. Channel 4's magazine show Out on Tuesday (1989) gave voices to marginalised queer people -- a highlight was Khush (1991), which celebrated South Asian lesbians and gay men living in Britain, North America and India, and was directed by Pratibha Parmar.

Plenty of documentaries about lesbian lives were made in the 1980s but British fiction films about gay women were few. A rare example is Mai Zetterling's Scrubbers (1982), set in a female borstal, while towards the end of the Thatcher era Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1990), based on Jeanette Winterson's novel, was a huge hit. More elusive still in 1980s British cinema are depictions of trans lives. While the US has led in interesting depictions of trans people, gentle sitcom Boy Meets Girl (2015-2016) is a rare example of a British take on a transgender protagonist. Throughout British cinema and TV history, lesbian and trans viewers have had to be content with one-off episodes of TV anthology series or supporting roles in heterosexual-focused stories.

The activism of the 1980s, supported by British filmmakers, paved the way for the repeal of Section 28 in 2003 and the passing of the Civil Partnership Act a year later. Same-sex marriage followed in 2013 but writing today the situation for LGBT people is murkier. Following the referendum on Britain's EU membership in 2016, the most divisive recent political event, homophobic attacks rose by 147 per cent, while the 2017 general election resulted in the sitting government opting to rely on an openly homophobic party to achieve a Parliamentary majority and remain in power. At the time of this release, how an uncertain political climate will affect LGBT people remains to be seen but, with equipment and online platforms widely accessible, filmmakers have more opportunity than ever to confront homophobia through their art.

Alex Davidson is the film programmer at JW3 and a former curator at the BFI National Archive. He regularly writes for Sight & Sound and the BFI website. His specialty is LGBT cinema and television.

Article sourced from the booklet included in the BFI's dual format edition of My Beautiful Laundrette (2017).

[perpugilliambaker]

got any recommendations for good six serials?

Thanks for the ask!

I had to resist the urge to say “ALL OF THEM!” but even I will admit that, out of Six’s modest selection, there are some serials that are better served for recommendations than others.

In general, I’d recommend Vengeance on Varos as a good first serial. Not only is it the most lauded of Six’s television stories, but it’s also thought-provoking. The message is still pertinent today.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the 1983 film Videodrome, but Vengeance on Varos is basically a Doctor Who version of that. It portrays a society where citizens derive their entertainment from torture and snuff films. The Varosian government creates these films using prisoners, broadcasting them as prime time fodder for their audience. The serial was denigrated back in the 80s for being too violent in theme, but that’s the point. It’s meant to shock and perturb in order to promote anti-violence. Sil, the main villain, is justly praised for being a brilliant character who is played superbly by Nabil Shaban.

But there are also a few other Greatest Hits, as far as the general consensus is concerned.

If you’re a fan of daleks, Revelation of the Daleks is the last serial of season 22. Like Varos, this is another grim story, but this one features touches of black humour at times that “lighten” the mood. To pay respects to an old friend, the Doctor and Peri visit Tranquil Repose, a place where the wealthy can have their bodies cryogenically frozen until science can cure whatever killed them. All of these dead bodies in suspended animation obviously attracts the attention of Davros, who intends on creating a new race of Daleks. This was the first Six serial I watched and I fell in love immediately. Some of the side-characters take themselves so seriously that it’s hilarious. There’s a rockabilly DJ, a girl who’s obsessed with her coworker, and said coworker who thinks he’s hot stuff but treats everyone like rubbish. (Please note that “Those ruby red lips were made for kissing” is not a good pick-up line!)

If you like the Second Doctor and Jamie, Sontarans, and/or want some light viewing, The Two Doctors is the obvious choice. It’s an amusing tale that takes place in Seville, Spain. While Varos promotes anti-violence, the Two Doctors promotes vegetarianism. This story is a clash between the the Sontarans (who want a time machine to aid in a war), two Androgums (one who wants to experiment on the Doctor to find out the secret to time travel and the other who wants to chow down on every human he can get his hands on), and the Doctors (who also want to eat every animal, vegetable, and mineral in sight). This serial plays out more like a comedy sketch, to be quite honest, but I say that with the greatest affection. (If you’re a Blake’s 7 watcher, Jacqueline Pearce plays one of the Androgums.)

If you have a predilection towards historicals, The Mark of the Rani takes place in 1830s England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The Master is in this, but he plays a supporting role to the Rani, a new Time Lord adversary for the Doctor to duke it out with. She’s fiddling with some Luddites’ brains, stealing a chemical that prevents them from obtaining any shut-eye (and thus they become incredibly vicious and destructive). This is the only serial where Six’s companion Peri, a budding botanist, is given the chance to flex her skills.

Not to split hairs but, personally, I don’t believe there are any “good” serials or “bad” serials, just serials you like and serials you don’t. Similarly there aren’t any good or bad Doctors, only those you love and those who may not resonate with you as much. I love The Twin Dilemma and consider it a fantastic story, but that’s not the fandom’s prevailing opinion. If any serial’s summary speaks to you, then watch it. If you like Cybermen, go ahead and watch Attack of the Cybermen! If you’re an HG Wells fan, watch Timelash! You never know what you might fall in love with sometimes.

Anyway, that’s my piece!

[emptymasks]

Can you recommend any musicals that are online that have a a lot of lgbt rep but also a happy ending. I don’t really like sad endings and much prefer happy endings. I know a lot of musicals are dark and have gloomy endings so this might be a difficult answer sorry🙏🏻

Sorry this has take ages to get to answering, I've been trying to think of and find ones that fit because the ones I think of first don't have happy endings for the LGBT+ characters because the whole tone of the musical is kinda dark.

What I'm assuming you mean by sad ending is any really dark musicals or the LGBT+ character/s dying. There are some musicals out there that aren't dark, and have happy and brighter parts, but still have the LGBT+ character die at the end. So all of these musicals have no LGBT+ deaths in them.

I'm just going to list all musicals with LGBT+ characters and no LGBT+ characters die and/or don’t have very consistent dark tones, and link to any videos of them I know of, if there are any. 

List is under the cut with names, summaries and links! It's just under the cut so this post doesn't take up loads of room on everyone's dashboard.  There’s for sure more, these are just the ones I know about.

Any videos labelled ‘proshot’ are professional/official recordings. Any videos without that are bootlegs, as in filmed by an audience member.

Avenue Q

"The laugh-out-loud musical tells the timeless story of a recent college grad named Princeton, who moves into a shabby New York apartment all the way out on Avenue Q. He soon discovers that, although the residents seem nice, it's clear that this is not your ordinary neighborhood. Together, Princeton and his new-found friends struggle to find jobs, dates and their ever-elusive purpose in life."

Main gay character

Video | Audio Audio 2

Bathhouse: The Musical!

"The show follows the story of Billy, a wide-eyed youth venturing into a bathhouse for the very first time. He is looking for love, but soon realizes that the other patrons are looking for something "a little more temporary". With some guidance, Billy soon learns the ins and outs of bathhouse etiquette."

Various mlm characters

Boy Meets Boy

"The show is a fast-paced, light-hearted musical-comedy, featuring a 1930s style Astaire/Rogers romance between two men, and a same-sex marriage. The world of the play posits that in 1936, same-sex relationships are considered as normal as heterosexual ones. The play begins against the background of the abdication of Edward VIII and ends with the Duke of Windsor's (and the protagonists') June 1937 weddings. This is appropriate, as one of the major themes is "Giving it Up for Love". The action occurs in the Savoy Hotel, a few elegant nightspots in London, a bar in Spain, and a black-sheep aunt's disreputable establishment in Paris."

Lead gay romance

Video | Audio

The Break Up Notebook: The Lesbian Musical

"The Break Up Notebook tells the story of Helen Hill, a thirty-three-year-old lesbian from Los Angeles. Having just been dumped, she begins dating again with the support of her gay friend Bob and her butch and femme gal pals Monica and Joanie."

Lead lesbian character, supporting lgbt+ characters

La Cage aux Folles

"Based on the 1973 French play of the same name by Jean Poiret, it tells the story of a gay couple, Georges, the manager of a Saint-Tropez nightclub featuring drag entertainment, and Albin, his romantic partner and star attraction, and the farcical adventures that ensue when Georges's son, Jean-Michel, brings home his fiancée's ultra-conservative parents to meet them. La cage aux folles literally means "the cage of crazy women". However, folles is also a slang term for effeminate homosexuals (queens). Opening on Broadway in 1983, La Cage broke barriers for gay representation by becoming the first hit Broadway musical centered on a homosexual relationship. The show's Act One finale, "I Am What I Am", received praise as a "gay anthem" and has been widely recorded. The original production ran for more than four years (1,761 performances), and won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book."

Lead gay drag queen character, lead gay romance

Video | Audio Audio 2 Audio 3

Everybody's Talking About Jamie

"The musical is inspired by the 2011 television documentary Jamie: Drag Queen at 16 directed by Jenny Popplewell. The musical follows a 16-year-old teenager as he overcomes prejudice, beats the bullies and steps out of the darkness to become a drag queen." A film version of the musical is set to be released in September 2021.

Lead gay drag queen character

Video (Proshot) 2021 Film Trailer | Audio

Firebringer (one of the few on this list I’ve actually seen and would 100% recommend if you want something fun to watch)

"At the dawn of humanity, one tribe of cave-people survives the many trials of prehistoric life under the wise leadership of Jemilla, The Peacemaker. Jemilla taught her people to express themselves, rather than bashing each others' heads with rocks and eating each others' babies. But one member of the tribe doesn't seem to fit in: Zazzalil. She's always trying to invent things to make life easier… for herself. While out hatching her latest scheme, Zazzalil stumbles upon the most important discovery in history. One that will pit her tribe against wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and change the world forever. She'll travel from omega to alpha, and become… the Firebringer!"

Two lead bisexual women characters

Video (Proshot) | Audio

Hair

"Hair tells the story of the "tribe", a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the "Age of Aquarius" living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War. Claude, his good friend Berger, their roommate Sheila and their friends struggle to balance their young lives, loves, and the sexual revolution with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society. Ultimately, Claude must decide whether to resist the draft as his friends have done, or to succumb to the pressures of his parents (and conservative America) to serve in Vietnam, compromising his pacifist principles and risking his life." There was a film adaption in 1976.

Everyone's sexuality is basically up for debate

Video (Proshot) Act 1 Act 2 (Austrian production but sung in English and spoken in a mix of English and German) Video 2 (Broadway 2009 Revival) | Audio Audio 2 

Head over Heels

"A jukebox musical featuring the songs of The Go-Go’s and based on Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Head Over Heels is the story of what happens when the royal court of Arcadia is threatened by the mystical Oracle of Delphi with the loss of its “Beat,” the divine power that ensures the kingdom’s prosperity. King Basilius, whose own title is at stake, forces the members of the royal family and court on a journey to the woods in an attempt to escape the Oracle’s seemingly unavoidable prophecies. Through a plot containing usurped kingship, unlikely lovers, and gender-fluid disguises, Head Over Heels preaches unconditional love and acceptance of yourself and everyone you know, no matter their gender or sexual identity, and uses some of the greatest pop rock hits of the late 20th century."

Main non-binary character, a genderfluid character, bisexuals (A lgbt+ character does die but is brought back to life soon after)

Video | Audio

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

"The musical follows Hedwig Robinson, a genderqueer East German singer of a fictional rock and roll band. The story draws on Mitchell's life as the child of a U.S. Army Major General who once commanded the U.S. sector of occupied West Berlin. The character of Hedwig was inspired by a German divorced U.S. Army wife who was Mitchell's family babysitter and moonlighted as a prostitute at her trailer park home in Junction City, Kansas. The music is steeped in the androgynous 1970s glam rock style of David Bowie (who co-produced the Los Angeles production of the show), as well as the work of John Lennon and early punk performers Lou Reed and Iggy Pop." A film version was made in 2001.

Lead genderqueer character (TW and spoiler but I think I should give a heads up for the mention of a botched gender-reassignment surgery in the song 'Angry Inch')

Video (2015 Broadway Revival) Video 2 (1998 Off-Broadway) | Audio Audio 2 Audio 3

It Shoulda Been You

"The bride is Jewish. The groom is Catholic. Her mother is a force of nature. His mother is a tempest in a cocktail shaker. And, when the bride's ex-boyfriend crashes the party, the perfect wedding starts to unravel faster than you can whistle "Here Comes the Bride!"  It's up to the sister of the bride to turn a tangled mess into happily ever after in this musical comedy for anyone who ever had parents."

Main lesbian and gay character

Video | Audio

The Kid

"The protagonist, Dan, is a sex advice columnist who decides to adopt a child with his partner Terry. Throughout the musical the couple encounter difficulties including making the decision to adopt, finding a birth mother, and overcoming apprehension about the adoption process."

Lead gay romance

Kinky Boots

"Based on the 2005 British film Kinky Boots, written by Geoff Deane and Tim Firth and mostly inspired by true events, the musical tells the story of Charlie Price. Having inherited a shoe factory from his father, Charlie forms an unlikely partnership with cabaret performer and drag queen Lola to produce a line of high-heeled boots and save the business. In the process, Charlie and Lola discover that they are not so different after all."

Lead drag queen character

Video (Proshot) | Audio Audio 2

A New Brain

"A New Brain is a show about making the most out of life in the face of tragedy. When a neurotic, frustrated composer is confronted with a terminal illness, he finds comfort in the healing power of art. The show is in fact the William Finn’s autobiographical account of his own battle for life when he was afflicted with a seemingly terminal illness. As the central character, Gordon Michael Schwinn struggles to survive, he finds salvation in the healing power of art."

Lead gay character

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

"Adapted from Elliott's 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the musical tells the story of two drag queens and a trans woman, who contract to perform a drag show at a resort in Alice Springs, a resort town in the remote Australian desert. As they head west from Sydney aboard their lavender bus, Priscilla, the three friends come to the forefront of a comedy of errors, encountering a number of strange characters, as well as incidents of homophobia, while widening comfort zones and finding new horizons."

A lead trans-woman character and two lead drag queens

The Prom

"The musical follows four Broadway actors lamenting their days of fame, as they travel to the conservative town of Edgewater, Indiana, to help a lesbian student banned from bringing her girlfriend to high school prom. A film adaptation, produced and directed by Ryan Murphy, was released on Netflix on December 11, 2020."

Lead lesbian character

Video | Audio

Soho Cinders

"A modern adaptation of the Cinderella story, Soho Cinders transfers the action to the heart of London's Soho. The eponymous heroine is replaced by a young rent boy called Robbie who gets wrapped up in an illicit affair with an aspiring politician called James Prince. The story intertwines elements of Cinderella with contemporary political scandal and an urban setting."

Lead gay romance (I don't know 100% that no LGBT+ character's die in this, I couldn't find full summaries)

Audio

A Strange Loop

"The musical is about Usher, coincidentally named the same as his day-job as an usher for The Lion King on Broadway, a fat, Black, gay writer who tries to navigate the heteronormative white world. He is backed by a six-person all-black-queer ensemble who voice his inner thoughts as he begrudgingly ghost writes a new Tyler Perry stage play."

Lead gay character

Audio

Tanz der Vampire

Professor Ambronsius and his young assistant Alfred are on the hunt for vampires and stumble upon a small village. They suspect that the villagers know more about vampires than they let on, and soon discover there is a castle in the woods where the vampire Graf von Krolock and his son Herbert live. While staying at the inn, Alfred meets Sarah, the innkeeper’s daughter, her father being so overprotective that he keeps her locked in her room every day and every night. Sarah longs to escape her life and has been secretly conversing with Krolock for some time. She’s no damsel in distress, she’s attracted to him and what he offers and so she sneaks out of her home and goes to his castle. Alfred is convinced she has been kidnapped and he and the Professor go to the castle to rescue her.

Main bisexual character, supporting gay character

Video (German with English subtitles) | Audio

Victor/Victoria

"Based on the 1982 film of the same name, which was a remake of the German film comedy Viktor und Viktoria shot by Reinhold Schünzel in 1933 from his own script. When refined British soprano Victoria Grant finds herself down on her luck in Paris, she discovers to her dismay that producers and nightclub owners are looking for a sound that is much less “legitimate” than hers. On the brink of starvation, she is rescued by Toddy, a warm, generous, and flamboyant nightclub singer, who gets a brilliant idea: dress Victoria as a man, and pass her off as a female impersonator, where she will delight the whole of Gay Paree with her eerie gender-bending and astonishing vocal range. No sooner does Victoria find success in her new role, then she falls in love with King Marchan, a tough Chicago nightclub owner and possible gangster who oozes masculine appeal. King, in turn, is terrified to find himself falling for a man, and refuses to be believe that “Victor” is truly “Victor”. With hired detectives creeping through her hotel room, King’s showgirl lady friend Norma Cassidy out for some jealous revenge, and King’s sweet bodyguard, Squash Bernstein, revealing his homosexuality to smitten Toddy, Victoria’s life is a whirlwind of complications. Can she really go through life being Victor/Victoria? Victoria must decide which is more important: a thrilling new career, or a sweet and sudden love. With a jazzy, sophisticated score by Henry Mancini and Frank Wildhorn, and a clever book by Blake Edwards, Victor / Victoria is a wise, warm, and moving story about self-discovery, tolerance, and second chances, as well as a sparkling ode to the city of Paris, and giddy, flamboyant, creative nightlife of the 1930s."

Main gay and bisexual characters