LGBT+
Veronica Lee
Panti Bliss is not a name on many people's lips outside Ireland, but over the past year she has gone from little-known club performer to self-described “accidental activist”, and this utterly charming, funny and touching show tells her story.Panti (aka Rory O'Neill) is a drag artist who runs her own club in Dublin. Early last year she appeared on a chat show on Irish national broadcaster RTE, during which she made some innocuous remarks about people campaigning against equal marriage, calling them homophobic. The parties sued, RTE cravenly gave in and paid damages, but a national debate was Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hollywood has never met a cliché it didn’t love; unfortunately, neither has Dylan Costello. His peek behind the curtain of Tinseltown’s Golden Age employs every stock type imaginable, from the boorish, chain-smoking manager to a pill-popping Marilyn-lite. It’s a play with admirable aims, but desperately in need of a good script doctor.Playing the part of fresh-off-the-bus ingénue is British thesp Patrick Glass (David R. Butler), getting his big break in 1949 when – you guessed it – the movie’s lead actor is forced to withdraw. Not the victim of All About Eve scheming or a good shove down the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, nothing can prevent love blossoming. Sebastian’s second encounter with Andreas is punctuated by the latter vomiting after too much booze. It doesn’t put the brakes on the former’s growing passion for the leather-jacketed object of his affections. Soon, the pair are lovers despite Andreas declaring that he is not gay. He cannot resist Sebastian.The path of love often takes strange turns. In the Swedish film Something Must Break, the roadmap is ripped up. Sebastian (Saga Becker, pictured below right) is androgynous and gay: he is transgender. Although accepting of who he is, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an engaging, indie sense of emotional flux in writer-director Desiree Akhavan’s feature debut Appropriate Behaviour, and a very funny script indeed behind it. Akhavan herself plays Shirin, daughter of a traditional Iranian-American emigre family, who may define herself as bisexual but whose heart seems to be telling her she’s gay: she’s both distraught and angry after the film’s opening scene break-up with girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson, cooler and much more self-aware).Appropriate Behaviour loops loosely, and without signage, between past scenes from that relationship, from Read more ...
Gary Raymond
For many the story of Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas will be familiar. It has been told in many forms, and powerful and inspirational as it is, many times too. Thomas (known to all bar his mam as “Alfie”) is now not just a totemic figure in the sport he graced for 16 years, but a symbol of courage and hope for the LGBT community and indeed anyone who has at some point in their lives felt the walls closing in.The story of the first man in world sport to come out as gay is one that does not lose its power in the retelling, and National Theatre Wales’s much anticipated staging of it – in Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are two lucky people. They work in New York City where Ben paints and George teaches music. After they marry, the church school where George works fires him for being openly gay. Their life has come apart with the loss of one income. The couple must sell their co-operative flat and live apart - Ben with Elliot, his nephew (a convincing Darren E Burrows) and George with a couple of groovy gay cops (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez) one floor below their old flat. From there on, grumpus Ben looks on the dark side where George finds miracles in the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It doesn’t take many cucumbers smacked into cupped male palms to realise this isn’t, surprisingly, a show about salad. Russell T Davies has written three new series (Banana shows on E4, and Tofu online), exploring LGBT sexuality today. Queer As Folk, Davies’s 1999 breakthrough creation depicting the lives of three gay men living around Canal Street in Manchester, was an important landmark in dramatic depictions of gay life. Returning to the same location and similar themes now, now those lifestyles are mainstream and familiar across the country, it was always going to be harder to make a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Remembering the early years of social and sexual liberation in Swiss gay life, Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary The Circle (Der Kreis) has rich affection for its subject. In particular, that’s the relationship between teacher Ernst Ostertag and drag artist Robi Rapp, who first met in the Fifties and have been partners ever since. Both now in their eighties, their documentary remembrances of the time are intercut with staged dramatic material concerning Haupt’s wider subject, the world that grew up around the magazine, social centre and club of the film’s title.Switzerland was unusually Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode. It won the director the Best Film award in the Horizons Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There is nothing erotic or titillating about The Institute of Sexology, an exhibition the Wellcome Collection plans to keep open for a year. Those expecting a display of fertility symbols, fetish objects, kinky clothing or sex aids down the ages will be deeply disappointed. Just about enough objects and images are included to keep you interested, but the bulk of the show is not dedicated to sexual practices but to the 19th- and 20th-century doctors, anthropologists and psychologists who spent their lives studying sexual behaviour. And therein lies the problem. The exhibition format makes Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game. This highly anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, who was not only a gifted mathematician but also an ultra-marathon runner, is made even more alluring by an exquisite cast of Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley and Alan Leech (Tom in Downton Abbey), with Charles Dance and Mark Strong muscling up pivotal supporting roles.This beautifully designed Read more ...
Tom Littler
About a year ago, Alan Brodie, who is the agent for the estate of Terence Rattigan, sent me a handful of his more obscure plays. I had worked with Alan before on a revival of Graham Greene’s first play, The Living Room, so he knew I had a penchant for what are now termed "rediscoveries". The play that jumped out at me was Rattigan’s theatrical debut: a comedy called First Episode. Written while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford in 1933 (co-authored with his friend Philip Heimann), it seemed to me a fresh, funny, and painfully honest account of his experiences there. A little research Read more ...