It does my little homo heart good to see these mass marketers, big and small, pandering for our dollars. I’m especially thrilled, obviously, when said marketers make with the gay-themed special-edition DVDs and boxed sets. So I said yes—big time—to the Blu-ray release of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert from MGM. (It looks fab and is rather timely, what with the new Broadway hit version and all.) Also, I was especially moved by the local PBS broadcast of a tremendous new documentary focusing on our everyday lives called Out In America (on demand throughout the end of the month).
Then Zeitgiest’s sparkling new, 20th anniversary edition of Todd Haynes’ Poison arrived in the mail. Here was the virtual reminder as we celebrate Gay Pride, about how much has changed culturally and artistically since the movie’s release in 1991—and how much we need to thank Haynes and other queer artists for their pioneering efforts. The film—which vaulted the career of out writer-director Haynes and his queer producing partner, Christine Vachon, into the mainstream (including their most recent project, the five-part HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce)—was a sensation when it premiered at Sundance, where it took the grand prize.
Poison, which had completion funds partially provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, was next given a publicity boon that both Vachon and Haynes remember with glee in a 20th-anniversary Q&A conducted at Sundance that is included on the new DVD (which has been gorgeously remastered). This was an attack by conservatives on the film’s unapologetic gay themes and frank eroticism (which included a quick shoot of one of an actor’s penis). The publicity storm that ensued helped to turn Poison into an art house hit.
The film, inspired by the writings of Jean Genet and his homoerotic silent short film Un Chant d’Amour, interweaves three disparate stories, told in three distinct visual and acting styles. “The whole world is dying of panicky fright” reads a title card at the outset, as the three stories interweave and play out to their bitter conclusions. These are a mock documentary about a young boy’s shooting of his father and subsequent disappearance recalled by his mother, neighbors and classmates; a ’50s-style drive-in horror homage about a scientist who mistakenly drinks a dreaded formula and turns into a leprous murderer, shunned by the population at large; and the sultry, color-drenched fantasy of a prisoner infatuated with his cellmate (played by James Lyons, Haynes’s lover at the time and the film’s editor), who he had witnessed being humiliated for being gay years earlier in a juvenile detention center.
Just as Poison was hitting theaters in 1991 it was followed by a succession of other unabashedly gay-themed movies—The Living End, Edward II, Paris Is Burning, My Own Private Idaho, Swoon, The Hours and the Times; there were so many that film critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed this new movement from out, proud filmmakers as the advent of “New Queer Cinema.” (All of these films focused mainly on gay men. Lesbians would have to wait until 1994 and Rose Troche’s Go Fish for their own new queer cinema entry.)
Poison led the charge for these movies and is still a deeply unsettling experience (it’s not exactly a movie one wants to see every week) while Haynes’ metaphoric approach—a reaction to the AIDS pandemic—and the film’s defiant, unapologetic insistence on presenting an unavoidable queer sensibility were groundbreaking, cinematically and culturally. Haynes has gone on to make Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven (his masterpiece), I’m Not There and the aforementioned Mildred Pierce. However, perhaps none of these films, or many others of their ilk, would have found audiences (gay and mainstream) if Poison—the cinematic equivalent of a Molotov cocktail—hadn’t broken ground. LGBTQ characters abound in the movies and we have films like Poison, in part, to thank for that. Haynes’ movie helped audiences (perhaps “forced” is a better word) to see the world through Our Eyes and that is certainly something to remember—with Pride.
Film notes:
—Local out writer-director Coquie Hughes will screen her latest indie feature When The Lies We Tell but the Secrets We Keep with a gala red-carpet premiere Saturday, June 24, at 8 p.m. at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee. The film, which stars Andrea Dean (who co-wrote the script with Hughes) and Milon V. Parker, centers on the romance of two women with different lifestyles whose relationship is tested when a third person enters the picture. The film explores lesbian and gay themes in an urban setting with an “authentic street-level manner.” The source material for the film is also debuting in novel form at the event. Cast and crew will attend the festivities, which begins at 7pm. themakingsofmvp.com
—Out director-producer Crayton Robey’s 2009 Making the Boys, his documentary history of Mart Crowley’s seminal play and film The Boys in the Band, which has played to rave reviews in New York and Los Angeles, is coming to Chicago—at last—for a one-night-only, free screening on Thursday, June 30, at the Claudia Cassidy Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. The screening is being co-sponsored by the Queer Film Society (the non-profit film group which I head), Reeling Film Festival, the Center on Halsted, and the Legacy Project, and is being presented in part thanks to funding from Sidetrack Chicago. I’ll have a full review of the documentary in next week’s Windy City Times.
Check out my archived reviews at windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com. Readers can leave feedback at the latter website.