A few days ago Philadelphia and Freeheld screenwriter Ron Nyswaner made waves with an impassioned speech at an award ceremony calling for gay artists to be brave and insist that LGBT stories aren’t de-fanged, softened and ‘normalized’ by executives worried about mainstream appeal.

He also criticised Freeheld (while not specifically naming the movie), saying, We must be careful — as we become mainstream — that we don’t forget we’re the descendants of outlaws and rebels. We must resist the tendency to be de-gayed. One of my recent gay-themed projects had a lot of potential. But the producers became fearful. The gay characters were idealized. Their edges were smoothed out. The conflict between them was softened. Over my vigorous objections by the way, for the record.

However now he has backed off from that with a statement to THR, which reads, ‘At last week’s Vanguard Awards Gala, in the glare of the spotlight and the excitement of the moment, I made some remarks that need to be corrected and explained. In a speech that was meant to be a reflection on internalized gay-shame and self-censorship, I denigrated the courage and integrity of my colleagues on the movie Freeheld. These comments were inaccurate and unfair. The producers never suggested that the characters should be anything but thoroughly and proudly gay. We disagreed over the amount of conflict that should be present in their relationship; I won some arguments and lost others. The movie is satisfying and beautiful in many ways, particularly in the performances of the leads. The script that made it to the screen is weaker than it ought to have been and for that I must accept responsibility. I apologize to my colleagues for the pain my comments have caused.’

Some will undoubtedly see his backtracking as being the result of pressure being put on him. Those involved with a movie often has contract that forbids them from saying anything negative about the film for a certain amount of time, something that is seen as particularly important for smaller movies like Freeheld, which are chasing award nominations. However, Nyswaner may well be being completely honest in his retraction and he did overstate the case with his awards speech. At the moment it’s difficult to tell.

Few 20th Century playwrights had the same impact as Tennessee Williams, who became a legend thanks to the likes of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, Sweet Bird of Youth” and “The Night of the Iguana. Now he’s in line for a biopic, with Deadline reporting that John Lahr’s book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, is set to be the basis of a movie about the writer.

Broad Green Pictures is developing the movie, although it’s early days as now writer or director is yet attached.

As Deadline notes, ‘Williams, who was born in Mississippi, was a frail and sickly child whose alcoholic father was constantly on him to become stronger. When he got a little older in high school, he began to write and started winning awards for his essays. He decided to become a journalist and went to University of Missouri’s Columbia Journalism School before dropping out and moving back home to St. Louis where his father put him to work at a shoe factory. The tedium drove him over the edge and he suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of 24.

‘When he got back on his feet, he wrote his first play at Washington University (Wash U) in St. Louis and then ended up in New York, and that is when his career as a playwright took off. He also found love with his assistant Frank Merlo. Even though they had split up, Williams took care of Merlo until he lost his battle with lung cancer. Behind the scenes he took care of his schizophrenic sister with royalties from his plays. But like father, like son, and Williams became an alcoholic and led a life embracing addiction. He died at the age of 71.’

What that doesn’t mention is Williams difficulty and ambivalence about his sexuality. He ‘shocked’ many by repeatedly bringing gay themes into his plays, being one of the first to expose them to the mainstream. However his plays showed that as in life he spent many years deeply unhappy about being gay and wishing he could rid himself of it, treating it as a vice that would destroy him.

As it is so early in the process, we may never see the movie, but Williams is definitely a figure who deserves a biopic.

If you’re looking for queer arts that go a little bit leftfield and move beyond the mainstream, East London’s Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest. This year’s edition runs from 24th-29th November, and the line-up has now been announced.

With over 60 events across six days, London’s queer film and arts festival, Fringe!, returns for its fifth year with screenings, talks, panels, workshops, performance and parties, taking over 14 venues in East London. This year’s festival features an international focus, with representation from over 20 countries, and brings a packed programme of the most thought-provoking and cutting-edge new work from across the globe.

This year Fringe! hosts screenings and events at familiar festival venues including Hackney Picturehouse & Hackney Attic, Rio Cinema, Ace Hotel, Dalston Superstore and Rose Lipman Building, which returns as the festival hub with two screens, an exhibition space and the festival cafe. Fringe! is also proud to announce several new venue partnerships that will see films and events coming to Barbican Cinema, Genesis Cinema, The Glory and Fringe! first foray further north with three screenings at Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham.

Highlights include:

Feature-length films:

• Opening the film programme, Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a high camp, provocative and political biopic of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s 1931 trip to Mexico (24 Nov);
• Academy Award-nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Lithuanian film Summer of Sangaile by director Alanté Kavaïté is the coming-of-age story of two young girls (25 Nov);
• Following activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Maryland, USA, Yoruba Richen’s award-winning documentary The New Black explores the issue of homophobia in Black communities and exposes the Christian right wing’s strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political ideology (27 Nov);
• Depicting London’s drug-fuelled queer sex party sub-scene, Chemsex is a hard-hitting documentary by VICE on the ever-changing, fast-paced world of technology, drugs and our relationships with each other (28 Nov);
• Berlin’s lesbian sex scene is the focus of back-to-back screenings (28 Nov) with Marit Östberg’s When We Are Together We Can Be Everywhere and Goodyn Green’s Shutter. With star actress Liz Rosenfeld, Östberg presents a loving, honest and personal porn film about making porn, while Green’s Shutter is a mosaic of short, highly charged episodes of queer sexualities which reflect the spirit and freedom of the Berlin scene;
• Director Chris Belloni’s The Turkish Boat is a documentary on the first ever Turkish boat that took part in Amsterdam’s famous Gay Pride Canal Parade and follows Turkish-Dutch gay activists Döne and Serdar in their attempt to gain recognition and acceptance within the Turkish community (28 Nov);
• Inspirational rugby documentary Scrum, directed by Poppy Stockell, follows the lives of three men as they compete for a position on the team for the Bingham Cup 2014 – an international gay rugby tournament named after athlete Mark Bingham who died on United flight 93, on 11 September 2001 (27 Nov);
• Documentary Alex & Ali by Malachi Leopold tells a story of love and loss set against enormous political struggles, exploring themes of immigration, the right to love, cultural differences and competing ideologies. American Alex and Iranian Ali ended their secret relationship when Alex was forced to leave Iran ahead of the 1979 Revolution – Leopold’s heartbreaking documentary begins as his uncle Alex starts to plan a reunion with Ali on neutral ground, in Istanbul (28 Nov);
• Director Liz Rosenfeld’s The Surface Tension Series is a trilogy that explores anachronistic strategies of storytelling, filtering history through the lens of queer experience and relationships in present-day Berlin. The work questions the reliability and usefulness of nostalgia and of re-enactment, as well as examining the means by which radical personal history is made (28 Nov);
• Women and the Word: The Revival Movie directed by Sekiya Dorsett is a documentary charting the journey of seven Black women across America for The Revival – a slam poetry tour (29 Nov);
• The closing film, Dyke Hard, is director Bitte Andersson’s debut feature about a lesbian rock group’s journey to Battle of the Bands – a John Waters-esque Swedish feminist DIY road-movie musical, complete with ninjas, cyborgs, dykes on bikes, roller derby and villains (29 Nov);
• Brazil is a special focus at this year’s festival with documentary Favela Gay, directed by Rodrigo Felha, about queer life in Rio de Janeiro’s slums and Gustavo Vinagre’s hybrid documentary Nova Dubai exploring queer sex, urban spaces and gentrification
• Fringe! screenings also feature a packed FREE programme of short films. Each set of screenings focuses on themes such as Brazil, youth, sex, gender, queer identities, love and heartbreak (28 Nov).

Performance:

For the first time, this year Fringe! features full-length staged performance and a focus on technology, art and the body, including:

• Mamoru Iriguchi’s 4D Cinema employs black and white classic film clips and newly filmed footage, exploring what is live and what is recorded and fixed eternally on film (25 Nov);

• In The Lady’s Not For Walking Like An Egyptian, performance duo tarrab explode, expand and explore political texts and pop lyrics by 1980s female pop icons to ask questions about power and influence, the female voice, memory and seeing your Dad in tears on election night 1979 (26 Nov);

• Playwright and novelist La JohnJoseph presents a brand-new, work-in-progress piece, The Last Night in the Night of Alexander Geist. This uncanny, cinematic two-act theatre piece, sees La JJ exploring new realms of persona, paranoia and persecution. Fringe! presents the first work-in-progress performance (26 Nov);

• Baby Lame’s show Video Nasties is an interactive celebration of the bizarre and the grotesque featuring the capital’s most exciting cabaret performers in a programme of performance/lectures, happenings, films, games and late-night dancing (28 Nov);

• Portuguese post-porn performance collective Quimera Rosa’s Sexus 3 aka The Violinist questions socially constructed binaries, mixing scenes of cyberpunk surrealism with non-conventional sexual practices in which the performers transform their bodies into instruments through electronic prosthetics. The piece references both Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher and Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Additionally to the performance, Quimera Rosa will also run two workshops prior to the show (29 Nov).

Workshops:

Fringe! also offers a wide range of workshops including a DJ Workshop for Women, Queer Life Drawing, Shibari and Spanking (28 & 29 Nov).

Talks and events:

In addition to post-screening conversations and Q&As, Fringe! is hosting topical panels on ongoing debates on the disappearance of queer spaces and gentrification (28 Nov),  LGBT immigration (29 Nov) and the provision of PrEP (HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis) through the NHS (29 Nov).

FREE exhibitions:

This year Fringe! hosts three exhibitions showcasing new and exciting work by international artists in a group show (27 Nov) and two solo exhibitions by Ryan Coit and Sarah Elise Ambramson (24 Nov).

Full listings HERE

For years people having been asking why there isn’t an animated queer web series set around pieces of food that go to high school. Ok, nobody was wondering why it hadn’t been made, but when McTucky Fried High arrived it turned out to be a very good idea, as it proved to be a very entertaining way to look at real-life teen LGBTQ issues from a different perspective.

Season 1 was great fun (you can watch it below), and now the makers are looking for crowdfunding cash to make Season 2. The team has already received a $9,000 grant from the Chicago Digital Media Production Fund and Albert. P Weisman Award and are now hoping to raise the remaining $16,000 they need.

The makers promise that, ‘Season 2 will release seven episodes starting February 2016, and will use humor to tackle religion, feminism, STD’s and race – all while foregrounding and affirming LGBTQ characters and experiences. McTucky Fried High stands out as one of the only LGBTQ animated cartoons to date.’

And if you’re in Chiacgo and want to help while having a good time, the McTucky Fried High team is  hosting a screening of Season 1 Tuesday, November 17th, 2015 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm at Columbia College Chicago 623 S. Wabash Ave. There is a suggested donation of $15-20, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. There will also be live music by Scott Nadeau and table reads of season 2 episodes followed by Q&A with McTucky Fried High creator and director, Robert-Carnilius. The crowdunding campaign ends on December 3, 2015.

Take a look at the crowdfunding video and Season 1 below, and then head over to Indiegogo to help out. [Read more…]