There’s a tendency to think gay rights started at Stonewall and before that, there was absolutely nothing. However before the riots on Christopher Street, various organisations in different countries laid the groundwork for the emergence of the gay rights battles. Whether it was the Mattachine Society in the US, the Minorities Research Group in the UK or the Swiss journal Der Kreis, there was social and political movement for gay people for several decades before 1969.
The new film, The Circle, looks at Der Kreis, which was the only gay publication in Europe to publish during the Nazi era (interestingly Germany had been home to several gay groups that had seen quite a lot of success in the Weimar era, but they were brutally suppressed once Hitler took over).
Here’s the movie’s synopsis: ‘Zürich in the mid 50’s: The young shy teacher Ernst Ostertag becomes a member of the gay organization DER KREIS. There he gets to know the transvestite star Röbi Rapp — and immediately falls head over heels in love with him.
‘Röbi and Ernst live through the high point and the eventual decline of the organization, which in the whole of Europe is seen as the pioneer of gay emancipation. Ernst finds himself torn between his bourgeois existence and his commitment to homosexuality, for Röbi it is about his first serious love relationship. A relationship which will last a lifetime.
‘The film looks back from the present to the time when the „Mother” of all European homosexual organizations had its high point to the time it slowly fell apart. While the repression against homosexuals became increasingly more intense in Zurich, two young and very different men fight for their love and — together with their friends — for the rights of gays.’
Following its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the movie is currently screening at film festivals. [Read more…]
Following the success of Behind The Candelabra and Looking, HBO certainly hasn’t had enough of gay-themed entertainment. One of its biggest original movies of 2014 is The Normal Heart, directed by Glee’s Ryan Murphy. The film, based on Larry Kramer’s acclaimed play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, is a bit of an all-star affair.
While there was a lot of hype over the launch of the San Francisco set, gay-themed series Looking, it wasn’t known whether HBO was likely to commission a second season. Indeed, before the first episode aired, creators Andrew Haigh and Michael Lannan suggested it was far from being sure thing.
Just hours after the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the National Enquirer published an article in which they claimed to quote the actor’s friend, the playwright David Bar Katz, as saying he and Philip had been lovers and this was why Hoffman has split with his female partner. It also said Katz has seen Philip using drugs and that he “wanted heroin and the gay life.”
It’s been announced that two award-winning and critically acclaimed documentaries looking at HIV and AIDS activism will be released on DVD in the UK in March 2014. Following their cinema releases, Fire In The Blood will come out on 24th March, while How To Survive A Plague is released on 31st March, ahead of the BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival, which runs 20th-30th March 2014.
For a long time people have compared the mutants of X-Men to the gay rights struggle – a group of people whose inborn difference separates them from society and who have to battle a society who are prejudiced against them just because of who they think they may be rather than who they actually are.