Happy Pride!

I decided that for this year’s Pride I was going to watch as many gay/lesbian/queer movies as I could think of. Some of these movies (the rom-coms) I have seen at least half a dozen times and I cry every time because I love rom-coms and these are especially good as far as rom-coms go. And there are series/movies that I have never seen.

Here is my list so far:

The Normal Heart (HBO)

The Boys in the Band (2020) (Netflix)

The Boys in the Band (1970) (maybe library – not streaming on any platform I have)

Fire Island (Hulu)

Bros (Netflix)

A Nice Indian Boy (Hulu)

Tales of the City (1993) (Netflix)

More Tales of the City (1998) (Netflix)

Tales of the City (2019) (Netflix)

Philadelphia (Disney+)

Dallas Buyers Club (maybe library – not streaming on any platform I have)

And the Band Played On (HBO)

Longtime Companion (maybe library – not streaming on any platform I have)

Mapplethorpe (new on Netflix)

The Robin Byrd Show (new on HBO)

Queer as Folk (Showtime)

Angels in America (HBO)

It’s a Sin (HBO)

The L Word (Hulu/Showtime)

The L Word: Generation Q (maybe library – not streaming on any platform I have)

The list does not have enough queer or lesbian films/shows, so suggestions for additions are welcome. And I know I will be watching many of these movies/TV series way past June but that is of course okay.

So far, I have watched The Normal Heart, The Boys in the Band (2020), Fire Island, and Bros. All were re-watches – the first two it was the first re-watch since I originally saw them. And there were a lot of things I had forgotten from each, so it was almost like watching them for the first time.

I am looking forward to watching the two new documentaries – Mapplethorpe because I love his work and The Robin Byrd Show because her show was appointment TV (along with Al Goldstein’s Midnight Blue) in the TV room in my NYU dorm, when cable was new.

I saw the original The Boys in the Band with my mother. It was not a movie on my radar – I would have been about 13yo and was not familiar with the play or the movie. My mother wanted to see it and I do not remember if she asked me if I wanted to go with her or if she insisted I accompany her. At the time, a lot of the movie went over my head. I saw it again on cable some years later and certainly understood it much better. (And I fell in love with Cliff Gorman as an actor and was thrilled to see him on Broadway in Lenny just a year later.) It is an intense movie but perfectly captures a moment in time just before Stonewall and Pride. The film caught a lot of shit in later years because of the way it portrayed self-hating gay men but eventually the thinking came back around so that there was the Broadway version in 2018 (the original play was only off-Broadway in 1968 and the 1970 movie starred the actors from the play) and then another movie version with the Broadway cast in 2020. Playwright and screenwriter Mart Crowley died in 2020 but not before getting a small part in the movie and taking part in the documentary about the making of the film.

The Normal Heart was also an intense and difficult film to watch. It deals with the beginning of the AIDS crisis (initially called GRID – gay-related immunodeficiency) and Ned Weeks (the Larry Kramer character) who helps to form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis but is frustrated because the GMHC board wants to play nice with politicians, who want to ignore the disease. Or worse. The movie ends before ACT UP is formed.

I remember reading the reports in the Village Voice about this new disease. Hibiscus, who died in 1982 of what was still called GRID, had this fabulous billboard above Village Cigars.

The Voice reported on the loud and angry meetings that led to the group that broke from GMHC and the people who laid down in the streets and disrupted mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the fact there was a plague being ignored by the government – both federal and city – and many religious leaders and that no one seemed to care that gay men were dying by the hundreds and then the thousands in a very short period of time.

I saw Larry Kramer interviewed at the New Yorker Festival. I had always admired him, especially after all the shit he took for writing Faggots and that he was perceived as criticizing the “promiscuous gay lifestyle.” The book is funny and a good read.

But I remember the fear in the early 1980s when so much was unknown about HIV and AIDS. Could you kiss someone safely? Too many people I knew refused to even shake a gay person’s hands for fear of “catching it.” Then the drug cocktails, which seemed to do more harm than good. In 1982 to 1983, I was working at a big restaurant in the West Village and most of the staff was gay and I knew who was practicing safe sex and who was not and I loved those guys and I wonder…just like I wonder about the group of men I hung out with in San Francisco in 1978 to 1979, before we knew so many were going to get ill. Later, I got a phone call about one of them but I lost touch with everyone there in those days before social media.

For several years, I danced at the annual GMHC dances to raise money. (My sister sang at one of the dances.) My boss at the time would match the total I raised. And I would go by GMHC and pick up their little packets that included condoms and other things and give them as a thank you to anyone who pledged money. It was so great to dance the night away and raise money for a good cause.

Anyway, I am looking forward to getting through this list and laugh and cry and feel joyful.