The internal battle over Prop 8 strategy has taken on a Tinseltown tone as openly gay studio Hollywood directors worry about the tactics of Prop 8 protesters, while queer indie figures like Mysterious Skin director Gregg Araki voice full-throated support for protest and boycott efforts.
The L.A. Times sits down with several prominent gay Hollywood power players and we learn that if you're a big studio gay, you think that the gay rights movement ought to make peace with the establishment and if you're outside the system, you're all for Internet-enabled protests and boycotts– not exactly the biggest shocker in the world, but it's neat to see how much your career path can influence your politics.
In the big studio camp, Dreamgirls director Bill Condon refers to Prop. 8 protesters as the "off-with-his-head" crowd and rhetorically asks:
"If you're asking, 'Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?' . . . the answer is, 'Of course we do.' But we also believe that some people, including [Richard Raddon, director of the L.A. Film Festival who donated $1,500 to support Proposition 8] saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry."
Scott Heim’s debut novel, 1995’s Mysterious Skin rocked the literary world with its stark portrayal of child abuse and sexuality in a sleepy rural town. Ten years later, director Gregg Araki adpated Skin into a film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose daring performance transformed the sitcom sweetie into an indie darling.
Heim’s third and latest, We Disappear, finds the former New Yorker returning to Western Kansas. But this time, dude gets personal. Queerty correspondent Megan Metzger recently sat down with Heim to discuss this latest tome, how writers must adapt in a world where we’d rather read a blog than a book, hiding inside his characters and why we should all join him at a reading this Thursday. Hint: it's more than just the free booze.
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We were first introduced to gay filmmaker Gregg Araki in high school when we saw The Doom Generation, but it was a few years later that we were truly won over by his earlier film The Living End. It's a tale of a street hustler and a filmmaker, both HIV+, driving across the country on the run from the cops and having lots of hot sex along the way. It's fraught with danger and sexual energy, has very spare dialogue, and requires some degree of interpretation.
Araki takes risks, and consequently his films aren't for everyone, but they are thought-provoking and always feature incredibly hot guys. Because of his groundbreaking work in gay cinema, he is being honored at the Provincetown International Film Festival with the 2006 "Filmmaker on the Edge" award. The festival started yesterday and continues through June 18, if you live nearby and want to catch a movie and see some crazy film queens running around in thongs (at least that's how we imagine it).
Gregg Araki is a filmmaker on the edge [In Newsweekly]
Provincetown International Film Festival [Official Site]
