Welcome To All That

Reviewing Jeffrey Escoffier’s gay porn history Bigger Than Life recently, I also talked about the first time I saw Jochen Hick’s documentary double feature on the business, Sex/Life in L.A (1998) and Cycles of Porn: Sex/Life in L.A. Part 2 (2005). It was an exhausting, unnerving, but also secretly exciting experience. I watched it as a special screening at my local film festival in 2005. Continue reading →

There’s no limit to how wrong I can be sometimes. Now the time has come to give a particularly tough spin on my apology to Zac Hanson, of whom I said – in an adoring Early Gay Crushes piece, no less! – that he would “never be hot”. To my defense, I did add “at least not in the classic sense”, which may still be correct, and I could of course not foresee exactly how great the drummer would look in 2010. But I was wrong, bigtime. Continue reading →

Let me interrupt the regular flow of pop culture commentary for a quick note on the World Cup. First, briefly, the substance Continue reading →

Even people who have seen and loved it, tend to shake their heads when I tell them that I rewatch Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004) at least twice a year. It’s a great movie, they say, but isn’t it enough that it has burnt itself onto my memory once? I see their point – a physically and emotionally brutal drama, it’s not exactly feel-good material – but at the same time, I sense that there’s something else to their reluctance: Is it even possible to love a movie about child abuse? And, if so: Should you feel bad about it? Continue reading →