By the time The Nance reaches its final image, Chauncey Miles is almost entirely alone. The theater around him is closing, the ceiling begins to give way, and he remains beneath a damaged spotlight, singing the number audiences know as his signature. It is an ending that captures the contradiction at the heart of the Lincoln Center Theater production: Chauncey can perform defiance in public, yet he remains unable to escape the self-hatred that governs his private life. That role is played by Nathan Lane, who carries the filmed production as a Depression-era comedian specializing in burlesque's “nance” character. Lane is outstanding, and his performance gives Chauncey both comic authority and painful vulnerability. Still, watching a stage production from a couch is not the same experience as seeing it in person, particularly when the running time approaches two and a half hours. My reaction to The Nance is therefore a personal one, and other viewers may respond to its rhythm and structure very differently. A performer trapped inside the joke The story takes place in 1930s New York City, when homosexuality was not merely condemned socially but treated as a crime. Burlesque theaters offered inexpensive, disreputable entertainment built around women dancing in revealing costumes and a steady supply of crude adult humor. Among the familiar figures was the nance, a caricature of a gay man. The joke depended on an uncomfortable fact: the part was generally played by a straight actor. Chauncey Miles breaks that pattern. He performs the nance onstage, but he is gay offstage as well. His life…
The strongest joke in Stop! That! Train! may simply be the sight of RuPaul as US president Judy Gagwell. It was the one gag that genuinely made me laugh in a movie otherwise determined to bombard its audience with knowing absurdity. For 90 minutes, the mugging, Gen Z slang, glaring colors and exaggerated visuals barely pause. Plenty of online critics appear delighted by the result, but despite its obvious ambition to be a nonstop comedy, it never clicked for me. At least the calamity powering all that noise is appropriately ridiculous. Low-level stewardesses Tess and DeeDee secretly board the luxurious Glamazonian Express on the very day it is due to meet the enormous Stormaganza. The brakes inevitably fail, leaving the train hurtling out of control while the storm closes in. Its path takes it toward an extraordinary patch of land occupied by a nuclear reactor, a dog shelter and actress Laurie Metcalf's home. The people who might prevent disaster are rapidly compromised. A rogue scorpion incapacitates the only crew member who knows what to do, while President Gagwell's old PTSD resurfaces at precisely the wrong moment. Whether the president can rescue everyone remains uncertain, so Tess and DeeDee are forced to take responsibility themselves. Tess occupies and reassures the passengers as DeeDee joins Cal in an attempt to repair the controls. Cal is also the conductor DeeDee is wildly attracted to, and apparently the kind of man worthy of appearing in a publication called Conductors We Want to See the Dick Of. He is played by English Teacher's Jordan Alvarez,…
The central problem with this experimental indie is not merely that its two leads are difficult to like; it is that the film gives their destructive behavior no meaningful dramatic purpose. Beto and August spend the entire movie together, yet the story never develops beyond a series of reckless episodes, leaving little reason for an audience to remain invested. The pair meet at a skate park in LA and immediately seem drawn to one another. Their bond is built around skateboarding, intensely destructive habits, and conversations about life and death. Before long, they agree to end their lives together. The film then tracks their last day as they move through the city, stealing a car and, at one point, threatening to kill a young woman. That outline is essentially the entire film: two men wandering around and creating chaos. Their actions feel random rather than revealing, and the movie offers no substantial explanation for either man's decision to die. It suggests unresolved trauma but never examines it, leaving the premise without the emotional or psychological foundation it needs. The execution is just as thin. The leads never leave the screen for a single scene, but their performances generate no convincing chemistry, and both characters remain thoroughly unlikeable and difficult to watch. The direction feels less like the construction of a story than the recording of two people being allowed to roam around for a day and do whatever they want. Nothing that happens seems worth discussing afterward, while much of their conduct is simply repulsive. The film also provides no…
Honestly, I'm kind of shocked this stayed off my radar for so long because I'm only just hearing about it now. This crowdfunded comedy drama follows three gay best friends navigating life, love, and disappointment as they enter their late fifties and early sixties. What are you supposed to do when you realize time is running out, there's more road behind you than in front of you, and your career, relationship, home, and pretty much your entire life look nothing like what you imagined when you were young? There are eleven episodes, each running about ten minutes. A re-edited 5-episode Director's cut version was also released recently this year. Ray, Gary, and James have seemingly been friends forever, and they've now reached what should be their golden years. Ray is a financially struggling screenwriter because work simply isn't coming his way, although he does have a younger, attractive boyfriend who's a bit socially awkward. Gary, a singer and actor, has just learned that he has anal cancer. He's been relying heavily on alcohol to deal with it and can't bring himself to tell his friends what's happening. James, meanwhile, is an actor who can't get cast in anything, is enraged with his agent, and has a major chip on his shoulder. Through it all, the three depend on one another while repeatedly asking how and where their lives went wrong. With no savings, no homes of their own, and no retirement funds, they wonder how they're possibly meant to survive at this point. Everything changes when Ray's ex, who has…
The second season of this comedy about three middle aged gay friends juggling work and love has finally landed on their YouTube channel. There was a pretty sizable wait between seasons, but the story resumes exactly where it stopped—and somehow the entire cast looks precisely the same, without a single visible change, which is honestly kind of wild. Season one skipped ahead a year and left us with the knowledge that Ray and Dwight were no longer together. This time around, the focus stays on Ray, Gary, and James as they navigate career problems, complicated romantic lives, and the question of what their futures are supposed to look like now that they're getting older. There are 8 episodes this season, each about 25 minutes long. Ray still hasn't gotten past his breakup with Dwight, and then he picks up a writing job on a girls' animated show, where he has to work out how he belongs in a room packed with much younger GenZ writers. He can't seem to release his grip on Dwight, and it's obvious that keeping hold of the past is stopping him from moving on. Gary, meanwhile, gets a co-host position on a talk show and begins preparing to film the pilot. Around the same time, he's hit with the news that he has a son from years ago, which means he suddenly becomes both a father and an unexpected future grandfather. That's a lot to absorb at once, but with the career opportunity and the family revelation happening together, it winds up being a genuinely…
Using oral histories, this documentary explores a very particular chapter of New York gay life in America. In 2014, a box packed with hundreds of letters was discovered in an LA storage unit. The letters, dating back to the 1950s, were addressed to a young man named Reno Martin, who would later become Hollywood agent Ed Limato. After Martin left home to pursue a career in radio, his closest gay and queer friends continued writing to him simply to keep in contact. Each letter is signed under a fake name and closes with a request to burn it once it's been read, which says everything about a time when being gay—or appearing in drag—could land you in jail. The filmmakers managed to find the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, turning what could have been dry historical research into something deeply personal and intimate. The filmmakers tracked down the original letter writers, several of whom are still alive, and had them speak openly about what it meant to live on the margins in those days. They've also assembled amazing archival photos and footage, bringing back the drag pageants and smoke-filled backrooms that once acted as a home base for the LGBTQ community, all under the constant weight of fear and oppression. At the time, you could legally be fired, beaten up, or worse simply for being gay. Closeted people who wrote love letters or anything that exposed their sexuality would nearly always tell the recipient to destroy them afterward, terrified they could end up in the wrong hands.…
How can there be such a dearth of stories that these vertical filmmakers keep recycling the same 5-6 story permutations and combinations, just mixing and matching them? It’s like some old fantasies are being brought to life in these formats. I’m really starting to lose it completely. Then you read all these random, glowing, made-up reviews online and wonder whether people are even watching the same thing I am.Liam and Noah are stepbrothers, though not many people know it. Noah’s girlfriend actually likes Liam and tries to seduce him. Meanwhile, Liam has secretly been crushing on his stepbrother Noah. Since Liam can’t have Noah, he suggests that maybe the girl should ask Noah for a threesome. That’s when a drunk Noah shows up, against his better judgment, and the two finally kiss. Noah is now confused too—whether he is gay and how he can be attracted to his stepbrother. The story moves slowly, with the two men gradually realizing each other’s good points and falling in love. Of course, the evil girlfriend tries to ruin everything by exposing their secret and threatening to get them out of the hockey team, but her plans fall flat. In the end, they get love and acceptance from everyone.This BL was good for the emotional pull of showing Liam always wanting Noah while Noah remains unsure about his feelings. There isn’t as much drama and evilness as you see in some of the other vertical gay shows. The two boys were quite good-looking, and Noah’s nerdy look was pretty hot. But Liam is the…
If you watched and loved Season 1 of Gaycation, Season 2 carries on from exactly where it left off, with that same mix of travel series and proper documentary that made the first season feel so real. Elliot Page and Ian Daniel return, this time heading to Ukraine, India, France, and the Deep South in the US. There’s also a special episode exploring what the Trump administration’s policies meant for LGBTQ+ people. The main run consists of four episodes, each around 45 minutes long, before the special brings it all to a close. Ukraine is their first destination, and they arrive in Kyiv shortly before the country’s second ever Pride march. The tension is palpable; Russian influence and the Orthodox Church seem to weigh on everything. They speak with activists who are truly putting their safety on the line simply to march through their own city, with riot police needed because counter protesters are nearby and prepared to turn violent. One of the most affecting moments comes when they meet a gay soldier who cannot come out to the people he serves beside, and it says a lot about how nationalism and war can make queerness feel like a betrayal. They also get a look at the underground rave scene, where music and dancing have quietly become resistance in their own right. In India, the series takes on a huge contradiction: a colonial-era law criminalising gay sex remains on the books, while the culture itself has a long history of hijra and third gender traditions. In Delhi and Mumbai, they…
I put this one off for ages, and honestly, I’m not even sure why. I’d somehow talked myself into thinking it probably wouldn’t connect with my LGBTQ world, but wow, was I wrong. This film totally blindsided me. It’s a smart dark comedy that manages to be properly funny and seriously heavy at exactly the same time, with surprises all the way through. Roman and Dennis are two young strangers who meet at a support group for people who have lost a twin. It’s such a specific, strange kind of grief that only someone who has lived through it could really start to understand. Roman is quiet and physically imposing, and his sudden flashes of rage feel even more disturbing because he is normally so still. Dennis is skinny, openly gay, and armed with sharp self deprecating humour that he uses as a shield. They could not be more different, yet tragedy brings them together, and their connection holds even after Dennis tells Roman he is gay, partly because Roman’s late brother was gay too. The two of them quietly start filling the space left by losing a sibling. Then, around 20 minutes in, the film rewinds and reveals something that changes absolutely everything. Dennis had met Rocky, Roman’s twin, slept with him once, and become completely obsessed. The day he turned up to surprise Rocky was the same day Rocky died in a car accident. Dennis, then, essentially made up a dead twin brother so he could get close to Roman through the support group. Even Dennis is not…
Released in 1988, this was apparently HBO's first-ever gay themed TV film. It was adapted from a play, and you can tell almost immediately, since nearly all of it unfolds in an apartment with two people talking through their grief and arguing over whether that grief belongs equally to both of them.The story begins after the death of a man named Colin. His ex-wife Marion, who spent more than a decade with him, and his lover Arthur, who stayed at his side during the brutal last months of his life with AIDS, meet in the loft they have each inherited half of under Colin's will and now have to sell. From there, the two sit with old resentments and fresh ones, orbiting each other, making confessions, and gradually trying to process a loss neither quite knows how to bear. Marion discloses that she has also been infected with the virus. Arthur, understandably, though also somewhat selfishly, wants to believe his grief is the more valid one. They're both shattered, and both need somewhere to direct the blame. Yet as more comes out and their defenses lower a little, the dynamic between them changes, and the tension slowly gives way to understanding and the start of a genuine friendship.What I appreciated was how little the film tries to make any of this big or dramatic. The characters respond as real people probably would: messily, inconsistently, and not always sympathetically. Both lead actors handle it well, and the writing captures how genuinely complicated relationships like these can be. Still, the constant back-and-forth…
This is a difficult one to pin down, and honestly, that's both its greatest ambition and its biggest flaw. It's a wildly eccentric psychosexual comedy attempting to invent an entirely new genre, and I truly can't think of anything else quite like it. But wanting to be audacious and successfully being audacious are two very different things, and for me, it simply didn't work. And just so expectations are clear, this isn't strictly a gay film. One of the two main characters is gay, and sexuality is definitely part of the discussion, but that's pretty much where the queer aspect ends.Joey and Craig are roommates, and their relationship is warm, though somewhat uneven. He covers the rent while she doesn't, so he can get away with things like making Joey sit in her darkened room when his Grindr date arrives because he's told the guy he lives by himself. The movie begins with Joey talking to her therapist and recounting this long, rambling tale about meeting someone named Brian, sleeping with him, and discovering that he's an alien. The monologue drags on forever, running through her entire messy past with Brian before finally explaining how Craig entered the story. When Brian turns up in their lives again and their apartment becomes more or less uninhabitable, they wind up spending a weekend at his house. Brian possesses this alien power where a simple touch can soothe and subdue anyone he encounters, and naturally, both Joey and Craig are pulled toward him in ways they can't fully control. Joey has tentacle sex…
At its core, this documentary is about the American religious right's aggressive opposition to the LGBTQ community and the harm that causes families caught between their faith and the love they feel for their own children. The film takes a gentle, patient approach, clearly hoping to convince people with conservative religious beliefs that there is no reason to be fighting the LGBTQ community. It keeps its attention on parents: how they responded when their children came out, what the families endured, and how they eventually reached a point where they could offer support.The film begins with the Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage and the backlash that followed across much of the country, though that is not really its central concern. Its real focus is four families. The first is an evangelical family in Washington state whose entire world is shaken when one of their sons comes out as gay. The parents speak very openly about putting him through conversion therapy, and about how badly he struggled internally, eventually developing serious drug problems and dying. Two more stories involve transgender children, one boy and one girl, and both are especially compelling because prejudice against trans people is so much more intense considering how small that community is. You can also see that things are gradually changing, since one of the people featured is Sarah McBride, who became the first trans person ever to speak at a national political convention when she addressed the 2016 Democratic convention. The fourth story follows a gay Puerto Rican immigrant whose grandmother rejected him, though…
