Gay Life Magazine
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New Home To My
Reviews Since 2008
Publisher: Duane Booth

The What, Where, & When of Gay Buffalo
Serving Western New York
Home To My Reviews
Since 1998
Publisher: Tim Moran

Who am I and why should you listen to what I have to say about gay cinema? Well, for starters I could cite the film classes I took at art school, coupled with a lifetime of studying queer film history, but it boils down to this: I love cinema and I love writing about it.

Life is short enough without me boring you to death, and so the specifics about my approach to reviewing these films - without my life story and its historical context - can be found further down underneath the headlines: How I Lost It At The Movies and Reviewing Gay Films.

My name is Mike Klemm. Since 1998, I have written the video column for Buffalo, New York's free monthly gay newspaper, Outcome, published by my friend, Tim Moran. I'm a graphic artist/writer who was once editor/art director of a now-defunct free weekly entertainment paper called Metro Weekend. When it became Buffalo Beat, I left for creative reasons. I've occupied space on this Earth since 1958. I've been out and proud since 1988 when I turned 30 and met my life-partner of almost 20 years, Andy. (I was a late bloomer but now anyone who objects to me being queer can bite me.)

I said that I adore films. I also love gay films. I love it that there are so many of them now - things were much different in my youth. A lot has changed in the last decade. When I first started writing this column, I sometimes had to search for films to write about - ones that could be rented here in Buffalo for one thing - this was when the major rental chain didn't carry most gay films and before Netflix.com where you can find almost anything. Now, almost 10 years later, I don't have enough space in a monthly publication to write about them all and I have to be selective. The obscure indies usually get more attention than the mainstream ones.

Because, like I said, I love cinema. As opposed to movies (Ingmar Bergman's Persona is cinema, Revenge of the Nerds is a movie). I fell in love with film as an artform when I took a few film courses in college. You haven't lived until you have taken Dr. Geraldine Bard's Hitchcock class at Buffalo State College. I'm pushing 50 and my readers must realize that when I took her film classes, in the late 70s, there was no such thing as home video. You couldn't rent the film and freeze frame it, you could only watch films in a movie theater or on television. So, imagine the excitement of seeing Psycho's shower scene as she paused the projector shot by shot. This all appealed to me as an art student too; I learned things in those film classes about the language of cinema that would stay with me forever. Sit me down now in front of our 60 inch television with a restored print on DVD of Vertigo or Citizen Kane and I am in heaven.

But I also love Queer Cinema. I became intimate with its history while reading Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet (1981, revised 1986) - a book that I still consider to be the definitive study of our cinematic past. I wish that Russo had lived to see how queer film exploded in the 90s. The reviews on this site are the collected columns that I have written for Outcome in Buffalo - which is, by the way, a town with a very large and visible gay community.

My first exposure, like Russo's, to gays and lesbians onscreen was overwhelmingly negative. Any gay man on the screen or on TV was a screaming queen. And lesbians were usually biker dykes. This was the prevailing stereotype of the day - gay men were feminine and lesbians could kick your butt. I have known many people over the years that do fit those molds - and there is nothing wrong with that - but clueless filmmakers in the 70s intended these portryals to be negative and wanted audiences to laugh at the "freaks." As a teen, I watched a killer in a dress kicking James Caan around in a film called Freebie and the Bean, which ends with Caan repeatedly shooting the queer (the audience I watched this with actually cheered!) Gay men and women were usually depicted as degenerates (Deliverance, anyone?) and they often committed suicide in the last reel. In 1978, I had just come out to myself at the age of 20 and, unlike today, there were no positive images that this confused young closeted gay man could look at on the screen.

Baby Steps

A glimmer of hope in 1982... a film called Making Love with two masculine men playing gay in a big Hollywood release. I remembered Michael Ontkean - and Kate Jackson - from a TV show when I was 15 called The Rookies and I'd seen a shirtless hairy chested Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans the year before. Expectations were high. At last I was going to see two men kiss romantically onscreen and I watched this seminal moment in queer cinema history with an audience that laughed hysterically as Ontkean and Hamlin locked lips. This was traumatizing to say the least.

Flash forward four years to 1986. I'm 28 and living in my first apartment and I have cable TV and a VCR. And Cinemax showed a film called Parting Glances. This film rocked my world. Parting Glances was like a Woody Allen film but filled with gay people. Right in the first scene Michael and Robert kiss and make love, and I had never seen male affection this open and natural in a movie before. And nobody was coming out, these guys were just gay and how they got gay wasn't even part of the story. It was sexy and it was funny. And heartbreaking too. AIDS was part of the story; it was the first film I had ever seen that even mentioned AIDS and this was during the worst of it in the 80s - a time that had lengthened my stay in the closet considerably. This film made no concessions for straights in the audience and it was a revelation to this closeted gay man pushing 30 in the 80s. It is still my favorite queer film.

Then came Kiss of the Spider Woman. All right, William Hurt could have butched it up a bit in spots, but when he and Raoul Julia kissed it was like the earth moved. Vito Russo was right when he wrote that we were starving for images of ourselves onscreen.

Maturity

A few independents began to venture into gay waters after I met my life partner, Andy, in 1988. I have fond memories of seeing Torch Song Trilogy and Longtime Companion with him in the movie theater. Then there was the 90s version of Making Love - Philadelphia. It tried, and it educated straight people - but it didn't go far enough. Which was sad because, at the same time, New Queer Cinema was starting to explode. There was Todd Haynes' Poison, Gregg Araki's The Living End and Tom Kalin's Swoon. The Living End was like a bolt of lightning - for once the queers weren't victims and they were angry too. ACT-UP was in full swing and queer cinema reflected this.

The 90s was also a time when many queer films were no longer just about being queer. Rose Troche's Go Fish is a good example of a breakthrough film that is just about a group of women who happen to be lesbians. Ellen came out and queer characters began to appear as sassy sidekicks in many mainstream movies.There was a lot of experimentation, and then things got a little less edgy later in the decade, and more mainstream, but it was thrilling because there were so many queer films out there now. The Anjelika movie theater from NYC came to downtown Buffalo for a year and queer faire was almost always on the marquee. I couldn't have imagined this when I was in my 20s and listened to comics on TV make jokes about AIDS.

Ellen and Will and Grace brought positive gay figures into straight people's living rooms. Queer as Folk and The L Word pushed the envelope on Showtime. And Brokeback Mountain became the artistic success and the crossover hit we have wanted for decades.

[A longer version of my personal history with queer cinema as I grew up and came out - with more examples - appears in the purple box at the end of this introductory essay. Yes, this was even more long-winded before I cut it down.For those who aren't bored yet, the longer version of the last 6 paragraphs can be found below.]

How I Lost It At The Movies
(Apologies to Pauline Kael)

Have I seen every gay film ever made? No, there are only so many hours in a day, but I try to see as many as I can. But I've closely watched the development of queer cinema for over three decades. I try to bring a little history into my reviews. I put older films into the context of their times. Taxi Zum Klo (1981) would probably not get made today. My reactions to certain themes in the films often reflect the time the review was written. By the late 90s I was so sick of coming out films that I sometimes latched onto any gay film that did something new and completely different. Who knows, I might be more critical of some of the films that I praised if I saw them for the first time today. Things have changed so much that, though I grew up starved for queer images, I've also lived to see a time when I could actually get blase about it.

I've left the reviews as I have originally written them. Except for a few instances where I have fixed a factual error or a really awkward sentence. The original run date is at the start of each review. As I put these review pages together, it was like a trip down memory lane. I would remember how this film was a landmark at the time, how this one was vilified in the gay press. I also remembered how I usually had to go to this one video store that specialized in the offbeat in order to rent many of the titles I wrote about. I remembered how the major chain wouldn't carry most of these titles and how later I found them on netflix.com. There were times when I ended a review by lamenting how you could find the film in only one video store in Buffalo. And I ranted a bit at times. My other target was the film ratings board and its double standards when it came to rating gay films. A same sex kiss was enough to warrant an R rating until the late 90s. This, luckily, has improved somewhat. I go into detail about this a bit more in a sidebar that accompanies many of my earlier reviews.

Reviewing Gay Films

A reviewer is supposed to be impartial. Of course, we all know that any critic will bring his or her own biases into a review. This becomes even more pronounced when gay reviewers write about gay films. For a long time, we usually based our reviews on whether or not a film depicted gay people in a positive light. This remains a valid consideration but it is no longer the only one. Since we seem to have moved past the dark ages of cinema where are all queers were degenerates, it is possible now to judge a gay film on its merits as cinema. Not all gay films are politicized anymore, so it is also possible now to be able to just watch a film like Adam and Steve for what it is - a light romantic comedy. But the current permissiveness is no excuse for films that aim for the lowest common denominator - a raunchy gay teen comedy is just as dumb as a raunchy straight teen comedy.

One thing that I can promise to bring to my writing is a reverence for our cinematic past. There is a disturbing trend in a lot of modern criticism that tends to treat anything that was made more than five years ago as being old. An online DVD review that I once read actually called the groundbreaking special effects of the original 1933 King Kong "embarrassing dated." You won't find that attitude here. Some films deserve a certain amount of respect accorded to them simply because they were the trailblazers. Okay, maybe we don't sit around and whine as much as the guys in The Boys in the Band do anymore, but let us not forget that that film was so controversial in 1970 that many newspapers refused to run the advertising for it. This is why silent films still turn up on critics' ten best lists and why people still read Herman Mellville.

When it comes to my own personal tastes, I have often been told I should turn in my "pink card." I would rather listen to Bruce Springsteen than to Stephen Sondheim and my tolerance for mindless camp has its limits. I love live theatre but I also love rock concerts. My most treasured book of all time is James Joyce's Ulysses. I prefer offbeat films to the mainstream - my favorite films include Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather part 2, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist, Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Milos Forman's Amadeus. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is my favorite screen comedy of all time.

My favorite gay films include Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances, John Greyson's Lilies, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Jon Shear's Urbania, Gregg Araki's The Living End. Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, Nigel Finch's The Lost Language of Cranes, Todd Stephen's Edge of Seventeen, P.J. Castellaneta's Relax...It's Just Sex, Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero and John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I also loved all five seasons of Queer as Folk.

Oh, and I don't believe in star ratings. According to a book of capsule video reviews that I once bought, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Porky's are both three star movies.

Gay Life In Buffalo

Buffalo is often mocked because of a few major snowstorms over the years but it is really a cool place to live. There are parks designed by Olmstead, architecture like Kleinhan's Music Hall, Sullivan's Guaranty Building, and the Darwin Martin house by Frank Lloyd Wright. We have great food here - and not just chicken wings. Sports fever is high in this town, but Buffalo is also home to the arts. The Albright Knox Art Gallery enjoys world renown, We have almost twenty professional theatre companies. Buffalo is also home to the biggest collection of James Joyce manuscripts in the world, and The Irish Classical Theatre hosts "Bloomsday" (a celebration of Joyce's Ulysses) on June 16th every year. We also have quite the vibrant gay community. At this writing, there are 9 gay bars, a Gay Men's Chorus, numerous gay groups, and a gay pride parade and rally every year.

We also have two theatres that specialize in gay themed plays, and a third that does at least one each season. They are mentioned, from time to time, because most of these reviews were originally written for a local audience that is well aware of these groups. Buffalo United Artists (also known as BUA for short) is mentioned several times in my reviews. They like to be known as "Buffalo's Off-Broadway," but over the years, they have brought many challenging queer plays to town, including The Laramie Project, The Boys in the Band, Torch Song Trilogy and the plays of Brad Fraser and Paul Rudnick. They were the first theatre company to stage Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! after it closed on Broadway. [Update: Oct. 2007: BUA did it again; they were just the first theatre company to do McNally's newest play, Some Men, after it closed on Broadway.]

HAG Theatre, our own lesbian theatre company has been on hiatus for a couple of years and resting on their laurels, which include a much revived solo show about Gertrude Stein and an original play called The Vagina Dialogues. And The New Phoenix Theatre On The Park has staged works as varied as The Sum Of Us, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan and an original play about Rock Hudson. [Update: Oct. 2007: The Phoenix just had a triumph with Thrill Me, a two-actor, and one piano, musical about Leopold and Loeb, which starred its author, Stephen Dolginoff.] Buffalo also has its own version of the Tonys - The Arties - hosted each year by Artvoice Magazine.

We also have a free monthly newspaper named Outcome, and I am proud to have contributed these reviews and hope that my writings introduced my readers to some very fine queer films. I want to thank Outcome's publisher, Tim Moran, for giving me a voice all these years, and I also want to thank Duane Booth, the publisher of abOUT, a Toronto based, free monthy gay magazine (that also covers, and is distributed in, the Buffao area) for giving me a voice in his publication now as well. And, of course I want to thank Andy, my partner of 20 years (20 years, do you hear that Pat Robertson?) - that's us below - for all of his love and support.
May 2007
Update: March 2008

The Long Version
If you're still actually reading this... A recap of my personal history with queer cinema as I grew up and came out - with more examples...

My first exposure, like Russo's, to gays and lesbians onscreen was overwhelmingly negative. Any gay man on the screen or on TV was a screaming queen. And lesbians were usually biker dykes. This was the prevailing stereotype of the day - gay men were feminine and lesbians could kick your butt. I have known many people over the years that do fit those molds - and there is nothing wrong with that - but clueless filmmakers in the 70s intended these portryals to be negative and wanted audiences to laugh at the "freaks." As a teen, I watched a killer in a dress kicking James Caan around in a film called Freebie and the Bean, which ends with Caan repeatedly shooting the queer (the audience I watched this with actually cheered!) Gay men and women were usually depicted as degenerates (Deliverance, anyone?) and they often committed suicide in the last reel. In 1978, I had just come out to myself at the age of 20 and, unlike today, there were no positive images that this confused young closeted gay man could look at on the screen.

An exception to the 70s habit of mocking the fag was this Movie Of The Week in 1972 called That Certain Summer where a teenaged boy discovers that his father, played by Hal Holbrook, is more than just roommates with Martin Sheen and that's why his parents really broke up. I was 15, and oblivious to my sexuality, and I watched it expecting to giggle at the queers but was moved by the TV movie instead. I wish it was out on video because I'd love to see it again. After 35 years, I'm sure that parts of it will be embarrassing (they probably tried to have it both ways in the movie) but most of it is supposed to have been handled seriously. Around this time, though I never saw the show myself, PBS broadcast this documentary series called An American Family. Most today would call it the forerunner of reality TV but something really radical (for the early 70s) happened on that documentary - the son, Lance Loud, came out to his parents as the cameras rolled.

Near the end of high school, a local channel began to broadcast Norman Lear's soap opera spoof, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman. A friend had seen part of it in another city and said "Wait until you see the two fags that move in down the street from her." My memory is fuzzy on this - mostly because I stopped watching the show - but I do remember that the "fags" were two normal looking guys and there was no stereotypical humor. I can recall a scene where one told the other that he was sick of pretending and just wanted for the two of them to come out to the neighborhood. I don't know if they ever did.

Around this time everyone was talking about the film version of the Bobbie Gentry song, Ode To Billy Joe, where we find out why Billy Joe MacAllister really jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge. It was because he was a fag, everyone laughed. And since this was the 1970s, and he was queer, that meant he had to kill himself.

I turned 20, realised that I was gay, and felt alone because my kind was invisible in popular culture. I loved foreign films; I wondered if there were any good foreign films that featured homosexuals. In 1979, I had somehow heard of a German film called The Consequence about two gay men in love. Of course it never played here in Buffalo. (I wouldn't finally see it until its recent DVD release in 2006! - my longing to see this film intensified when I discovered, in The Celluloid Closet, that it was a film by Wolfgang Petersen, the director of Das Boot and that his star Jurgen Prochnow was also in the 1979 film.) I also heard about a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder called Querelle when I saw this illustrated script of the film in a Toronto bookstore filled with pictures of a built, hairy chested Brad Davis in a tank top sailer suit. This film never played Buffalo either and I finally saw this one years later too on VHS in 1989.

Somewhere during this time, I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Many queer kids had catharsis when they first saw that film and heard its mantra, "Don't dream it, be it." Unfortunately, I didn't see it with the right people. My best friend went on for weeks about "the fag in the black panties." Yes, with friends like that I was a closeted individual in my youth. The same friend, however, liked La Cage Aux Folles a year later. At first he made tsk tsk sounds but by the end of the film he, like most people, thought that the sanctimonious Deputy Minister of the Pillars of Morality was the one who was ridiculous and that the two flamboyant gay guys were harmless. I liked that film a lot for its message about tolerance, and it is certainly funny. I still like it; I like it better than the American remake two decades later, The Birdcage. I do think that the message comes across in both films nicely. I didn't see Cruising when it first played in the movie theaters, I was too afraid to.

Baby Steps

A glimmer of hope in 1982... a film called Making Love with two masculine men playing gay in a big Hollywood release. I remembered Michael Ontkean - and Kate Jackson - from a TV show when I was 15 called The Rookies and I'd seen a shirtless hairy chested Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans the year before. Expectations were high. At last I was going to see two men kiss romantically onscreen and I watched this seminal moment in queer cinema history with an audience that laughed hysterically as Ontkean and Hamlin locked lips. This was traumatizing to say the least.

There was also, at the same time, a German film, (that actually did play here at the old Allendale theater when it was still a movie house), called Taxi Zum Klo and I read the review about a school teacher correcting student papers in a public lavatory while getting some glory hole action at the same time and I decided to pass on that film; it sounded too extreme (the picture of the bearded man in a dress didn't help matters) and I was having coming out issues of my own at the time and that film might have been too much at the time for little old me. I wouldn't see that one either until I found it for rent at Mondo Video on VHS in the 90s. I'm not sure how I would have reacted to it in 1982 - there are scenes bordering on hard core porn in that film!

About the same time, a film called Personal Best offered steamy lesbian sex but treated it as transitory because Mariel Hemingway ran off with a guy at the end. Personal Best did better at the box office than Making Love - straight guys seem to like watching two women do it. Films during the early 80s that touched on homosexuality were a mixed bag. Independant director John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven) surprised everyone with Lianna, a serious film about a woman who leaves her husband for a woman. It was a bleak film, but a surprisingly honest one for its day. Especially coming from a straight man as writer and director. At the other end of the spectrum was Partners, where Ryan O'Neal and John Hurt go undercover in a gay neighborhood to solve some Cruising-style murders. This was one of the most offensive "comedies" ever made. Everybody, let's laugh at the fags! But there was also the lovely portrayal by John Lithgow of the transsexual Roberta Muldoon (formerly football superstar Robert Muldoon) in The World According To Garp. This role could have been a cartoon, instead Lithgow becomes this character. Another breakthrough was Cher's remarkable performance as Meryl Streep and Kurt Russell's lesbian roommate in Silkwood. And don't forget Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon steaming up the screen as lesbian vampires in The Hunger.

Flash forward four years to 1986. I'm 28 and living in my first apartment and I have cable TV and a VCR. And Cinemax showed a film called Parting Glances as part of their Vanguard Cinema series. This film rocked my world. Parting Glances was like a Woody Allen film but filled with gay people. Right in the first scene Michael and Robert kiss and make love, and I had never seen male affection this open and natural in a movie before. And nobody was coming out, these guys were just gay and how they got gay wasn't even part of the story. It was sexy and it was funny. And heartbreaking too. AIDS was part of the story; it was the first film I had ever seen that even mentioned AIDS and this was during the worst of it in the 80s - a time that had lengthened my stay in the closet considerably. This film made no concessions for straights in the audience and it was a revelation to this closeted gay man pushing 30 in the 80s. It is still my favorite queer film.

Then came Kiss of the Spider Woman. All right, William Hurt could have butched it up a bit in spots, but when he and Raoul Julia kissed it was like the earth moved. Vito Russo was right when he wrote that we were starving for images of ourselves onscreen.

Maturity

A few independents began to venture into gay waters after I met my life partner, Andy, in 1988. I have fond memories of seeing Torch Song Trilogy and Longtime Companion with him in the movie theater. Both were quantum leaps forward for queer cinema. With Longtime Companion I was seeing lots of men kiss - and lay in bed with each other - for the first time ever on the silver screen. Then there was the 90s version of Making Love - Philadelphia. It tried, and it educated straight people - but it didn't go far enough. Which was sad because, at the same time, New Queer Cinema was starting to explode. There was Todd Haynes' Poison, Gregg Araki's The Living End and Tom Kalin's Swoon. The Living End was like a bolt of lightning - for once the queers weren't victims and they were angry too.

Poison chanelled Jean Genet's homoerotic prison novels into a triptych of inter-related stories, one of them a 1950s style cheesy black & white horror movie with an AIDS metaphor. In the Genet segment a group of boys in a juvenile detention home spit on the lad they just beat up. This film was damned on the Senate floor by none other than Jesse Helms because the film had been funded by the National Endowment For The Arts. (A similar fracas erupted over a certain Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit. And who could forget gay performance artists John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller, who, along with Karen Finley, were known as the NEA 4, and their battle with the Supreme Court?) Swoon retold the Leopold-Loeb murders with the queer element retained. And The Living End was agitprop that recalled the 1960s polemics of the Jean Luc Godard films that I loved in college. Queers were no longer victims. We were fighting back. ACT-UP was in full swing and queer cinema reflected this.

The 90s was also a time when many queer films were no longer just about being queer. Rose Troche's Go Fish is a good example of a breakthrough film that is just about a group of women who happen to be lesbians. Ellen came out and queer characters began to appear as sassy sidekicks in many mainstream movies.

There was a lot of experimentation and then things got a little less edgy later in the decade, and more mainstream, but it was thrilling because there were so many queer films out there now. The Anjelika movie theater from NYC came to downtown Buffalo for a year and queer faire was almost always on the marquee. I couldn't have imagined this when I was in my 20s and listened to comics on TV make jokes about AIDS.

Ellen and Will and Grace brought positive gay figures into straight people's living rooms. Queer as Folk and The L Word pushed the envelope on Showtime. And Brokeback Mountain became the artistic success AND the crossover hit we have spent decades waiting for.
May, 2007