LGBT+
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 ...
Tom Birchenough
Falling in love for the first time is one of the standard tropes of the movies. Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro gives it a new twist by making the teenage hero of his The Way He Looks (Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho) blind, and realising in the course of the film that he’s gay.It’s a modestly stated drama that won prizes at this year’s Berlinale, that speaks wider than its subject matter suggests. Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) has been blind from birth, so he never sees what we, the viewer, implicitly see: his Sao Paolo surrounding world, divided between home and school. What then is the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Oblique and gentle, Lilting is a tender, tough drama about Junn, a Cambodian-Chinese widow played by the legendary Pei-Pei Chang (HK’s martial arts icon known as “Queen of Swords” and recognizable to western audiences from Crouching Tiger...) and her dead son’s lover, Richard (Ben Whishaw), as Junn tries to sort out the untold nature of the men’s relationship.The opener of the London LGBT Film Festival, Lilting is as sensitive as one would expect, but raucous and ragged when it shows how one gets to the touchy truth. Not only is Junn alone, she is also quite without English (though she can Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Buried deep in the final credits for theatre director Matthew Warchus's second feature film, Pride, is a shout-out to his late father for teaching his son the twin virtues of compassion and comedy. Both those qualities, as it happens, are on abundant display in this buoyant venture from Warchus fils which works on multiple levels, all of them richly engaging.In its broadest sense, the film reminds us that society works in different, often extraordinary ways, as is clear from this account of that period 30 years ago when the gay and mining communities came together to mutually enriching effect Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love. The connection is stretched by cultural differences, and only exaggerated by differences (and therefore misunderstandings) of language.Lilting moves between a loose, if undefined realism, and a certain kind of hallucination. That tone is set in its Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Daniel loves Reg; so does John. Guy loves John; John doesn’t love Guy. Bernie loves Benny, and drives him mad. And as for Eric, he once thought he could fall for Reg – but they only shared one night together, and he never even knew Reg’s name. And anyway, as he points out, unlike the middle-aged others, he’s young – “I’ve got plenty of time.”Time, though, is a slippery commodity in the work of Kevin Elyot. And here, it’s not so much a healer as a killer. The 1994 play, set among a group of gay friends, takes place in the mid- to late-Eighties over several years and three scenes, each divided Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A theatrical pop song-cycle of musical postcards from the hotspots of memory from a semi-immortal polysexual sensualist’s life” is how the fourth solo album from Erasure's Andy Bell describes itself. The story and album begin with “Freshly Buggered”, where Torsten, born 1906, arrives at school to tell all that he is gay. “He had found a love so real, so pure” declare the lyrics.The extraordinary Torsten the Bareback Saint can't fail to provoke, raise a smile and carry anyone along with its sheer verve. Torsten’s itinerant life is evoked in 22 songs portraying encounters, frustration, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Few, I’d imagine, perform this operation with anything like the skill and intelligence of Dada Masilo, whose 2010 version of Swan Lake opened the lively short smorgasbord season that Sadler’s Wells are calling their Sampled festival. Masilo’s reinvention works because she understands ballet, and not just its conventions – though she skewers those with Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Espionage may have been the strict theme of the Brighton Festival’s Spies: Fact & Fiction (****), but the talk's perspective quickly widened towards broader aspects of statecraft, secrecy and surveillance. As might have been expected in a discussion chaired by the Guardian’s Luke Harding, which included ex-MI5 director general (long a novelist, too, with her alter-ego spook Liz Carlyle) Dame Stella Rimington, former defence minister Liam Fox (with his recent work of historical investigation Rising Tides: Facing the Challenges of a New Era – how does he find the time to write it?), and Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Miss this “gay” film at your peril - a thriller with a stronger story than most. Directed and written by Alain Guiraudie (King of Escape), Stranger at the Lake’s a stealthy ineluctable drama that draws the audience in as few other films can, with explicit nudity and sex integral to its unfolding.A gay cruising lake is the solo setting where Franck (Pierre Dalndonchamps) goes to socialise and have casual sex. Out of shape, older bloke Henri (Patrick D'Assumçao) becomes his friend and a kind of Greek chorus, outlining the film’s subtext. It is Michel (Christophe Paou) who attracts attention as Read more ...