festival circuit

The 14 Gayest Films at SXSW: Bears, Brothels and Boy Bands Aplenty

The South By Southwest festival has hit Texas and we’re sending two crazy Mexicans (Queerty contributor Daniel Villarreal and his brother Socrates) to cover it. They’ll be in Austin following films, having discussions with directors, mingling with musicians, and plundering promotional parties all in a quest for the queerest of SXSW. And with hundreds of events going on all week, they’ve started by finding the “queerest” of SXSW film (and by “queer”, we mean any film that deals with gender identity, sexuality, counter-cultural politics, oppression and, of course, hot same-sex lovin’). This year, that includes films about hairy gay men, Viagra, wife-swapping, free-love, street art, rock-and-roll, and robot love. Let’s engage.

 
 

BEAR NATION is just about the gayest movie at South By Southwest in terms of actual homosexual content. Being a bear himself, director Malcolm Ingram says, “This subculture has given me a lot; it helped me figure out my own place and it got me laid. I came out in my 30s and I didn’t know where I fit in. I looked at gay culture, shit like Will and Grace and I certainly didn’t fit into it. It made no sense to me. It was like, ‘Hey man, I like to suck dick but the rest of it you can keep.'” I’ve always found bears to be a bit of a clique without much sub-culture beyond “be stocky, have body hair.” Whether the film sheds any light on it remains to be seen, but the film’s also hosting an after-party after it’s Sunday March 14th premiere, so you can bet this otter will be there looking for answers… and bear hugs.

 
 

STRANGE POWERS examines two decades of music making by following Stephin Merritt, the openly gay frontman of the indie band The Magnetic Fields. The band’s most significant album to date is 69 Love Songs, an album that featured a handful of same-sex odes as well as ukulele, banjo, accordion, cello, mandolin, flute, xylophone, and all sorts of unexpected instruments. Though Merritt recently wrote the music and lyrics for the Broadway adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (which will feature actor David Greenspan playing “the other mother” in drag), what’s most exciting is that Strange Power’s director also co-wrote a script about the 1950s transsexual icon, Christine Jorgensen and is currently directing a film about lesbian indie band, Le Tigre; making her somewhat of an expert on contemporary queer figures.

 
 

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD seemed a great film to cover, for about a bajillion different reasons: the intersection of his mixed-racial identity and homosexuality; his tutelage under gay pop icon Andy Warhol; his entry into the art world spray painting buildings in New York City; his rise to international stardom as a pioneer of 1980’s neo-expressionism; his troubled relationship with fame and overexposure; and his eventual overdose on heroin make him an interesting study about gay creatives struggling with identity, craft, their own brilliance, and the pressures of the artworld. Furthermore, the director Tamra Davis has made film with other black countercultural celebrities including Chris Rock (CB4) and Dave Chapelle (Half-Baked).

 
 

At first mention, a film about the invention of Viagra might seem chuckl-eworthy at best. But when you actually think about the worldwide cultural impact the little blue pill has had since 1998, you begin to wonder why it took 12 years to make a documentary like THE ERECTIONMAN. Viagra might very well be to men what birth control was to women, a sexual aid that gave men more control over the longevity of their sexuality. It’s not just dirty old codgers who take the pill, a lot of young men do too. These same men who would have had to accept their sexual decline whenever nature and psychological impotence set in have now found a second life through chemistry, but considering how crazy sex makes some men, I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

 
 

Talking about how sex makes men crazy, LIKE A PASCHA is a Swedish documentary about the biggest brothel in Europe, a clear blue eleven-story house in the middle of Cologne, Germany with around 200 women from all over the world working there. According to director Svante Tidholm, if you ask the women why, they’ll tell you it’s the way it’s always been. As a a journalist, documentary filmmaker and writer, the director’s strong political focus on gender and equality issues will provide an interesting lens on how heterosexuals relate to each other as well as the unwritten rules governing male and female sexual behavior.

 
 

Most American teenagers have at least picked up an instrument with dreams of one day forming a rock band. But the simple dream is a crime in Tehran, Iran. In the documentary NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS, two friends recently released from prison who quietly search for other band members and a passage to Europe makes you realize how much we take our musical counter-culture for granted and the price some must pay for self expression, especially when you have no money or a passport.

 
 

In this age of ongoing marriage battles, it’s refreshing to see straight couples having to deal with their own queer take on matrimony. QUADRANGLE follows to real-world heterosexual couples who lived in a group marriage in the “free love” 1970’s. The two couples moved into one home, swapped partners and raised their kids together with visions of a new way for couples and communities to live and love. But as their individual marriages began to fall apart, they have to decide whether to live up to their own ideals or succumb to divorce and dissolution. We’ll be talking with the director of the film and getting her take on the intersection of polygamy, polyamory, and how the challenges and gifts of “non-traditional” marriage.

 
 

Geoff Marslett, the director of MARS developed an animation process specifically to give his sci-fi the appearance of a graphic novel. Even though it involves astronauts and robots on an intergalactic space race, it’s actually a romantic comedy that explores why we explore at all and how love fits in. Not only is the director a Texas native, Academy Award nominated animator Don Hertzfeld and Texas politician and country singer, Kinky Friedman both had a hand in the film’s creation.

 
 

In EARTHLING, director Clay Liford has created a troubling female science fiction film with a lesbian relationship, a pregnant child, and a sperm-like creature that lives in people’s minds. Judith infertility and recent health troubles have made her more distant from her husband and job. She gets into a car accident around the same time that astronauts discover a strange seed floating through space. But something doesn’t feel right about the doctor calling her accident a seizure and the sudden interest of one of her students. Director Clay Liford proved that he’s a masterful visual storyteller in his first film, Four Course Meal, a silent black-and-white film about a professional kidnapper.

 
 

THE HARDEST PART follows an aging fey out-of-work British television actor who is tired of being known as the butler from Manor House. He’s hungry to remake his image, but how many indignities will he endure to get a role in the film Dirt, Diamonds, and Destruction? Director Oliver Refson provides a comedic yet compassionate look about the cost and compromises that come with change.

 
 

With B-movies like Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives just appearing on the scene, you might think that trans-ploitation and gay-sploitation are the latest frontiers of late night gross-out films. But coutesy AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE, you might be surprised to learn that American films have been using lesbian, trans, and gay aesthetics to outrage and entertain audiences since the 1930s.

 
 

Hazing deaths, homoerotic rituals, and institutionalized sexism often keep fraternities in a bad light. BROTHERHOOD explores that dark space when an initiation prank, holding up a convenience store, ends up with a pledge brother getting wounded. It comes down to one man to make the decision whether to save his brother’s life or let the brotherhood take matters into their own hands. The men may be hunky, but the action is anything but fun and games.

 
 

The recent campaign against using the word “retard” in casual speech is much like the campaign to rid teenspeak of “that’s so gay.” Looked at one way, mentally and physically handicapped people get dissed as often as LGBT folks and just as ignored in mainstream coverage and accommodation. FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE views the issue through the lens of a 28-member Goodwill band made up of only mentally and physically handicapped individuals—and what’s more… they’re actually pretty badass. Since some of the band members could not communicate well for themselves, director Jim Bingham told some of their stories in a slow-paced intimate style that comes out through families and their individual performances.

 
 

When University of Texas student Barbara Smith got cast in an opera opposite her white male classmate, she experienced a racist backlash from the Texas legislators living in her own town. WHEN I RISE follows Smith’s journey from that condemnation to her eventual redemption as an internationally celebrated mezzo-soprano. It’s also a provocative nod at the extreme reactions to inter-racial coupling that mirror contemporary reactions to same-sex coupling.

 
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