Straight For Pay

Posted on May 27, 2010 by queerlefty

The issue of outing famous gay people is something we’ve discussed several times on this blog, so let’s give it another go. It’s not just because Out Magazine recently released their annual list of the most influential gay people, although there’s plenty of fodder for discussion there too. Continue reading →

Posted in gay | 2 Comments

Zac Efron Takes SMA Title For May; Nicholas Hoult Snubbed

Posted on May 18, 2010 by queerlefty

Having been on hiatus since February, it felt like the right time to bring back the regular edition of the SMA. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy doing the ‘Twenty over 30’ edition in April, but since the inception of this blog, the SMA has sort of become part of its backbone. But it’s easy to see that it has been away for awhile. When I discarded with the March edition, Nick Hoult of A Single Man looked set to dethrone Logan Lerman and take the top spot he had been angling for ever since the very first SMA. Sure enough, Logan Lerman, offered little help from my watching Gamer, was dethroned, just not by Hoult. Rather, Me and Orson Welles helped Zac Efron to top honors. The June DVD release of A Single Man should give Hoult a prime opportunity to take what was once his, however. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Why I Hate Writing Plot Summaries

Posted on May 8, 2010 by queerlefty

There are lots of reasons to admire film critics. First, it can be a thankless job. You have to sit through unfathomable amounts of crappy movies, and the price for getting to see them in advance and for free, is that you can’t leave them unfinished or simply dispose of them once they’ve flickered before your eyes. Or at least not if you aspire to be a good critic. Instead, you have to do a writeup as if the movie hasn’t already left your mind, perhaps even give it more attention than you think it deserves. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

On (Re-)discovering A Favorite Movie From Teenhood Is Gay

Posted on April 19, 2010 by queerlefty

One of the best things about Lukas Moodysson’s directorial debut Show Me Love (Swedish title: Fucking Åmål, 1998), is that even though I grew up with it, it has continued to grow along with me. Until I saw it again last night, I just thought that meant that it had stayed in my memory all these years, but there’s something deeper at display here. The spirited and earnest teen drama was simple and empathetic enough to work as a tale about self-acceptance and self-doubt when I was a searching 13 year old taking part in the public mass hysteria that the movie’s popularity caused in Scandinavia in early 1999. No matter what I thought about my sexual orientation, it was comforting to watch a movie so universal in its appeal and approach to teen romance that it made peers of mine declare, with their very straight faces, that the movie made them want to be lesbians. Show Me Love didn’t glorify or exoticize,it just made it seem natural. So natural, in fact, that it took until now, eleven years hence and far remove from the mass hysteria of its release, to fully appreciate it as a gay movie. Continue reading →

Posted in gay, movies | Tagged | 6 Comments

Me Against The Music?

Posted on April 13, 2010 by queerlefty

About a month ago, Pink Floyd won a lawsuit against the record company EMI, deciding that the group’s songs could no longer be sold as individual tracks; from now on, they shall not be sold separate from the albums they appear on. The case seem clear enough, since the group actually had a clause in their record contract detailing exactly that. And as someone who owns a handful of Pink Floyd albums and have listened to them off and on since I was 12, I can certainly appreciate that some of them – most notably The Wall, but also Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon – are albums with their own narrative structure and internal logic. They were never intended to being consumed in any other form or order. It would simply diminish them as albums. Continue reading →

Posted in music | 19 Comments

The Sexiest Males Alive List, Twenty Over Thirty Edition

Posted on April 9, 2010 by queerlefty

A couple of days ago, the excellent Jessie Carty – whose blog on writing and poetry should be appointment reading for any culture-interested reader – left a comment on the February edition of the SMA, noting how it to go along with the sexualization of teens. I addressed that issue as best I could, but apart from that, her comment inspired me to do something a little different for the April edition. This month’s list should stay perfectly clear of the morally dubious, as I decided to abide by a self-imposed rule: What would the list look like if I kept it to people 30 years or older? Continue reading →

Posted in Entertainment | Tagged | 14 Comments

Hanson’s Really ‘Somethin’

Posted on April 5, 2010 by queerlefty

I had just sat down to think about what I wanted to say in my upcoming second essay on the Hanson discography (the first, on Middle of Nowhere, is here), when Hanson decided to steal all my points by previewing a new single, Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’, that incorporates most of them. Continue reading →

Posted in music | Tagged , | 6 Comments

In The Company Of Critics

Posted on March 30, 2010 by queerlefty

My memory is not good. I wish I was one of those people who could read a book or see a movie, and instantly remember every plot point, large or small, or who only have to hear a song once to be able to recite the lyrics perfectly. I know people who can, but I’m not one of them. Ask me about a movie a week after I saw it, and regardless of whether the movie was worth the effort or not, I’ll probably be unable to tell you anything other than what kind of an experience it was. Continue reading →

Posted in Books, movies, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 22 Comments

Hanson’s ‘Middle of Nowhere’, A Point Of Pride

Posted on March 23, 2010 by queerlefty

You may have noticed that the tagline for this blog has changed lately. It used to be something like Gays. Guys. Movies. Music. Politics. Pop culture. All that and then some, and I liked the way that played off the blog’s title (Welcome to all that (and then some, get it?), but now it instead read Introspection masked as culture criticism. I changed it because I wanted to warn the reader that although this blog is concerned with the popular culture at large, it’s also a deeply personal blog. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Why The ‘Mad Men’ Crowd Should Stand Up For ‘A Single Man’

Posted on March 10, 2010 by queerlefty

In an ideal world, every new movie could be consumed in a vacuum. It’s what I love about film festivals. There, I have the chance to watch movies without having read anything about them beforehand; no reviews, no box-office reports, maybe not even a list of movies the lead has been in previously. But most movie experiences aren’t like that. In the real world, I had read scores of reviews about Tom Ford’s A Single Man before I ever got the chance to see it myself, and as much as I didn’t want to, they influenced how I approached the movie. Continue reading →

Posted in movies | 2 Comments