[rating=3]
US: 110 min • Peccadillo Pictures • DVD

A fascinating and thorough documentary about how Hollywood has dealt with sexuality over the years.

In the pre-liberation period – a time in which homosexuality on the screen was largely a matter of coded meanings and sub-text – The Celluloid Closet is fascinating. In the post-liberation years it loses its focus and descends somewhat into a ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ ahistorical celebration.

[rating=4]
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.

[rating=4]
Released on October 21st, 1997

Nyman’s soundtrack is as intense and disturbing as the film it accompanies.

Nyman’s Gattaca is a focussed and consistent work of minimalist composing that does not stray from the message.

Carved in Marble: An Interview with Gore Vidal.

Polari Magazine talks to the legendary author about his great character Myra Breckinridge, his 63 year writing career, and the turning point promised by the election of Obama.

My greatest achievement is that I’ve never killed anybody. Which reveals an awful lot of temptation. Because I have been visited.

Clementine relives the 1960s

Clementine the Living Fashion Doll on fashions of the 1960s and the ‘Gore Bob’ … is that really what she means?

Why are you wearing such outrageous ogle riah fakes and such a dolly caxton?

[rating=4]
US: 113 min • Universal • DVD

With a screenplay by Gore Vidal, adapted from the Tennesee Williams camp-a-thon The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Boom! has all the hallmarks of a cult classic.

Often extremely funny (sometimes unintentionally so), but always entertaining and at times quite moving, Boom isn’t a classic in spite of it’s disparate elements – it’s disparate elements are what makes it special.

[rating=5]
224 pages • Little, Brown • 1968

Wildly funny and deepy serious, Myra Breckinridge is a classic that marked a turning point in American history and literature.

The issues that Vidal explores – how identity and sexuality are shaped by the cinema and television, and how machismo is played out in irrational wars on foreign nations – are as relevant now as they were in 1968. It is a classic of the Cold War era in American literature.