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      in Music

      Brandi Carlile Has Always Seen Herself Clearly. Now It’s Our Turn.

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      Brandi Carlile was running late on account of a kitten emergency. She had arranged to pick up “this kitten thing” for her youngest daughter, Elijah’s, birthday, but then she was told she had to get it in the next 30 minutes, and the cat was an hour away. So now Carlile was sliding in front of her laptop screen for our interview with wet hair and a pink nose while also smoothly instructing an unseen collaborator in the details of deadline kitten extraction.Carlile raised her phone to show me a photo of a tiny gray tabby with tired eyes and a mouth like a child’s shaky line drawing. “It’s like a grocery store box cat, you know the kind you get,” she said. I didn’t really know anything about that, but Carlile said it with such scrappy authority that I felt pulled into her world, where there are two types of kittens: the kind that looks as if it was scooped out of a cardboard box and the kind that doesn’t. Carlile has an inside-joke squint and a gap between her front teeth and gently startled eyebrows that lend her the air of a woodland creature, which is kind of what she is: Even as she has become a rock star with fans like Joni Mitchell and Barack Obama, she has lived in the same log cabin dropped into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains for 20 years.For our interview, Carlile beamed in from a hayloft that she and her bandmates retrofitted into a music studio when she was in her early 20s. It features a cracking red paint job, makeshift charcoal curtains and a framed album of Elton John’s Greatest Hits. The whole thing has a teen goth hideaway vibe, and Carlile wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’m superstitious, so I don’t want to change anything about it,” she said. “A lot of good things have happened in here.”Carlile’s life story is a little bit like that. She has always been this effervescently strange person. What has changed is how she is perceived. Growing up in rural Washington state — not far from where she lives now — she was poor, she was a Jesus freak, she was a high school dropout and she was beginning to think that she was gay, and all of that added up to a tendency to be misread by the outside world. But Carlile saw herself clearly. “I had this observational way of walking through the early part of my life,” she said. She’s almost 40 now, married, with two daughters and six Grammys, but she feels unchanged: “This person right here was in that little kid’s body the whole time.”The title of Carlile’s memoir refers to wounded, discarded horses sold off so cheap even her family could afford them.via Brandi CarlileCarlile’s preternatural sense of self has helped make her into a revelatory singer-songwriter talent. Her music resists easy classification — the best you can do is toss a bunch of genres together, like alt-folk country-western pop-rock — but the grounding force is her silvery voice, which sounds like an element of nature. (If you’ve never been struck down by it before, start with “The Story,” “The Mother” and “The Joke” and then pick yourself up off the floor.) Carlile is a master of the voice-cracking power ballad, and her intimate self-studies nevertheless speak to anyone who has ever felt like a misfit, which is just about everyone. Now she is taking an even deeper look at her life: “Broken Horses,” her memoir, will be published on April 6.The book is a vulnerable document, not just because it exposes the most tender parts of her upbringing — the title refers to wounded, discarded horses sold off so cheap even the Carliles could afford them — but because the very act of writing surfaced her insecurities around her own literary education. As she charts in the book, Carlile was held back in middle school, placed in special education classes and finally washed out in the 10th grade. She told me that she sees the memoir as her honorary diploma. She hopes that it will banish the recurring stress dream she has where she materializes, nightmarishly, back in her old high school. In the dream, “I’m there, I’m 35, and everyone else is 17,” she said. “And I’m, like, really gay and freaked out.”BEFORE CARLILE FOUND her cabin in the woods, she lived in 14 places in as many years. Her childhood homes included a succession of single-wide trailers and a house shared by rats that had jumped from the dump across the street. Her family was so poor that they got by, at times, on food bank cans and elk her father shot. As a child, the harshness of her situation felt glossed with adventure; she really did hustle kittens out of boxes at the grocery store. And the transient nature of her young life granted her an almost omniscient perspective. While other kids’ memories disintegrated into the soft backdrop of their stable home environments, the kaleidoscopic intensity of her own childhood helped etch every detail into her brain. Pair that with an honest-to-God brush with death, when she had an out-of-body experience while hospitalized for meningitis at age 4, and baby Brandi Carlile was always weirdly self-aware.Which is not the same thing as being at ease. “I struggled to get along with other kids and spent a lot of time worrying about being poor,” she writes in the book. “I tried to make my singing the thing about me that would get me some attention.”“I’m always afraid of getting to the end of the grocery store line and having to put things back,” Carlile said. Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York TimesTaking a cue from her mother, who sang in country bands, Carlile burrowed out an escape hatch through music: She picked up a Southern twang from studying artists like Tanya Tucker, sang backup for her friend’s Elvis impersonator father and performed in musical competitions around Washington. She was drawn to women like Tucker and Dolly Parton and their “teased mullets and camel toes,” as she put it in the book, but her own undercooked style presented as a kind of floundering androgyny. She never liked the name Brandi Carlile. While her pageant-girl peers were ironing ringlets into their hair and painting on blush, Carlile was trying to channel Elton John, drowning in a man’s white polyester suit bedazzled by her mom. She lost every single competition she ever entered.As a teenager, Carlile didn’t come out so much as slowly and awkwardly emerge. She had never met another gay person, but she recorded the famous 1997 “I’m gay” episode of “Ellen” on a VHS tape labeled with the name of her high school boyfriend (“David’s baseball game”) so she could watch it again and again. Eventually, she was fired by fake Elvis when her “sexuality made the bass player uncomfortable.” Even her church rejected her: After a week of summer Jesus camp, her family and friends gathered to watch her be baptized, only for Pastor Steve to pause just before the dunk to grill Carlile on whether she “practiced homosexuality.”The dramatic public rebuke pushed Carlile to find God in music instead; she listened to Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” for days on loop. She may have been “a mean, scrappy little trailer girl with the wrong clothes,” she writes, but she had a “growing sense of self that was starting to stretch beyond my situation — I was way too poor and way too awkward to want to make as much of a spectacle of myself as I was.”What Carlile describes as awkwardness was also an inability of other people to see her for who she is. But she has always been this guileless person; she just had to find the right audience. She processed rejection by finding her own “misfit congregants” and working to bring them into the fold, she said. When she was still a teenager singing in restaurants around Seattle, she would grab a beer during breaks, work the tables and scribble down numbers. At the end of the month, she’d sit at her landline telephone and call 400 people to invite them to her big gig, and they’d actually show up.“They weren’t music fans. They were chowder house people who got a babysitter,” she said. “That’s what my career is now: It’s me trying to sit down at people’s tables with a beer and make them believe in me.”Every once in a while Carlile will pick up a phone call and Elton John’s voice will crackle onto the line.Hanna HanserothIn Seattle, she courted a pair of identical twins, Phil and Tim Hanseroth, to form a band, and they’ve now been fused together since 1999. Carlile’s wife, Catherine, described them to me as a “little creepy triangle,” with “creepy” being a Carlile high compliment. They split everything three ways — decisions, money, even the name. If they ever break up, the twins have the right to keep performing as Brandi Carlile if they choose.Within a few years, the band had attracted the notice of the producer Rick Rubin, and they have since released six studio albums, each buzzing just beneath widespread recognition until “By the Way, I Forgive You” broke through in 2018. The band had always punched above its weight; a 2017 cover album benefiting children living in war zones featured stars like Parton and Adele singing Carlile’s songs, plus a foreword written by Obama. But it wasn’t until they performed their queer anthem, “The Joke,” onstage at the Grammys in 2019 — “I have been to the movies, and I’ve seen how it ends/And the joke’s on them” — that they suddenly roared into America’s ear. In the audience, Janelle Monáe could be seen levitating out of her seat while Post Malone nodded reverently along. Carlile’s inbox was suddenly sparkling with celebrity emails. The band leveled up to playing arenas. Ellen DeGeneres invited her over for dinner.People who have had close encounters with Carlile describe walking away feeling totally disarmed. “She’s just a girlfriend,” said the singer Judy Collins, who counts Carlile among her favorite songwriters; they performed “Both Sides Now” together at the Newport Folk Festival in 2019. “She’s so easy and comfortable to be with — genuinely no nonsense, no attitude, no pre-emptive strikes.” To Glennon Doyle, the self-help author and activist, Carlile appears to go about her life with heart pumping outside her chest. “This is so cheesy, but her posture to the world is very Jesusy,” she said. The photographer Pete Souza, a longtime fan turned friend, says that she is totally unchanged by the presence of a camera: What you see is what you get. “Brandi is a rock star for like an hour and a half, three or four times a week,” he said. The rest of the time, “she’s just a regular person.”Often when a celebrity is described as “regular” (or its variants: “genuine,” “authentic,” “real”) it is an effort to pull them down to our level, to assure the public that the stars really are just like us. But Carlile possesses a regularness that makes her actually special. The resilience of her sense of self, through poverty and fame, is transcendent. One of her great strengths as an artist is a willingness to stare herself straight in the face and not flinch.When she was invited to her first big photo shoot, for Interview magazine, at age 21, she turned up in jeans and a Boy Scout shirt only to be confronted with a rack of evening gowns. “I just died inside,” Carlile said. “It didn’t even occur to me to put one of them on.” As she tried to politely duck out, the photographer suggested she throw a gown over her shoulders in defiance instead, and the shot became the cover of her first, self-titled album. When she made “By the Way, I Forgive You,” she commissioned a painting of herself because she wanted to confront what she really looked like, to totally surrender her image. She didn’t view Scott Avett’s raw, shadowy portrait until it was locked in for the album cover.“I had this observational way of walking through the early part of my life,” Carlile said. “This person right here was in that little kid’s body the whole time.”Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York TimesSoon the book will be out in the world, another permanent record of her life so far. Carlile is accustomed to self-exposure — “I’m a person that has to sing my 16-year-old poetry onstage every night at 40 years old” — but the book is not guarded by the artistic wash of a song. She wrote it in a flow state, scribbling it out in longhand and in notes thumbed into her phone, then handing over drafts of “chicken scratch” to her wife to help massage the grammar. She started with Pastor Steve, resurrecting every tactile detail of her botched baptism down to the borrowed boys’ swim trunks she wore under her poor-kid jeans.AS CARLILE ROUNDS 40, her life circumstances have finally aligned with that scrappy little trailer girl’s sense of self. She found the right clothes: Today she performs in sumptuous embroidered jackets and sparkling tailored suits. She found the right spot, the log cabin in the woods that’s become the permanent home she never had. And she found the right person.In 2009, when the violent home invasion and rape of a lesbian couple shocked Seattle, Carlile became involved in some community organizing around the case. Paul McCartney’s charity coordinator, Catherine Shepherd, got in touch to donate some memorabilia for an auction, and the two struck up an overseas rapport over the phone, with Catherine mentoring Carlile in the details of charity work. Carlile assumed that Catherine was, like, 65 years old. “I wish you could hear her voice,” Carlile said, adopting a patrician English accent, “because she’s very contemplative.” A year later, when Shepherd planned to attend a show in New York, Carlile was annoyed that she would have to ditch her friends to handhold the “charity lady,” but when Shepherd turned up, she was this 28-year-old knockout. By the way, Carlile’s accent “could use some work,” Catherine told me.Carlile met her wife, Catherine, through charity efforts following a violent crime in Seattle.Maria NarinoThe couple now have two girls, and live with a close network of bandmates and family members in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.via Brandi CarlileNow the Carlile women are overseeing their own rustic ecosystem. They’re always pulling in more land and friends and animals to live on what Carlile winkingly calls her “compound,” a 90-acre forest idyll inscribed with a network of ATV trails Carlile cleared herself. They live there with their daughters Evangeline and Elijah (their biological father is David of “David’s baseball game”), Carlile’s ex-girlfriend Kim and her partner (an arrangement Carlile calls “so lesbian”) and the twins.Over the years, her band has become, literally, family: Phil is married to Carlile’s little sister Tiffany, who does Carlile’s makeup and hair; Tim is married to the band photographer Hanna Hanseroth; and their cellist Josh Neumann is married to Catherine’s sister Sarah. Soon Carlile’s sound engineer, Jerry Streeter, will move in, too: He just married Catherine’s other sister, Hannah. (“Obviously, it did get creepy,” Catherine said.) When the pandemic hit, they all “podded up early” and burrowed into their apocalyptic commune life. They spent evenings gathered around a firepit in a clearing of cedars, drinking and swapping conspiracy theories. The band worked on a new album, which is due out later this year, and Carlile finished her book.Over the years Carlile has cultivated a network of allies that feels cribbed from her childhood diary. Dolly Parton has taken her face in her hands and prayed over her. At a jam session at Joni Mitchell’s house, Chaka Khan took Carlile’s wine out of her hand, said “you ain’t drinking that thing,” and poured it into her own glass. Every once in a while she will pick up a phone call from an unlisted number, and Elton John’s voice will crackle onto the line, delivering a howling monologue of profane life advice. (His suggestion for the title of her memoir falls short of Times standards, but you can find it in her book.)When I spoke to Carlile for a second time, she had just scored another Grammy (she won best country song with her supergroup side band, the Highwomen) and Elijah had gotten her kitten. The first cat never materialized, so Kim had raced to a shelter to adopt a different one, a velvety gray girl they named Zelda Rainbow Lavender. Carlile is always having to remind herself that this is her life now — she has stability and money and she’s friends with Elton John. “I’m always afraid of getting to the end of the grocery store line and having to put things back,” she said. Now, as she waited for her memoir to hit the world, she was already contemplating her next act of disclosure.“I’m always going to need to find a way to explain to people that I don’t think I belong here, but I am here,” she said. “I think I’m always going to be coming out of the closet, you know what I mean?” More

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      in Theater

      Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

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      Liza Birkenmeier’s new play about a shape-shifting teenager makes a fitting contribution to Theater in Quarantine’s revamp of the avant-garde.The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, Greta even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineIt’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.Honestly SincereOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page More

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      in Music

      Serpentwithfeet’s Music Is Otherworldly. But His Message Is Down to Earth.

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      On his new album, “Deacon,” the singer and songwriter makes a stark emotional pivot: “I didn’t want to go down in history as the sad boy, because I’ve just experienced so much joy.”The singer and songwriter serpentwithfeet’s 2018 debut album, “Soil,” mingled heartbreak, desperate longing and a search for solace. But he chose pleasure over angst for his second album, “Deacon,” which is filled with songs that savor flirtation, romance, sex and lifelong connection. “I celebrate that I can love and that I’ve been loved,” serpentwithfeet said about the album, due March 26. “And I get to be as jubilant as I want to be.”In a video chat from his home in Los Angeles, he wore a T-shirt with “Kingston” in big letters over a cartoon sun, along with a sunburst medallion. The same medallion appears on the album’s cover photo, which shows serpentwithfeet embracing another Black man. Both of them are dressed in white, as if for a ritual or a celestial ascension.As a Black gay man who grew up in a deeply religious family, serpentwithfeet, now 32, grappled with self-doubt and spirituality alongside love and desire on “Soil” and on his 2016 EP, “Blisters.” “A lot of what I’ve explored in my work is trying to figure out how I can legitimize myself, how I can validate my feelings,” he said, “and that hasn’t always been easy.”His music draws in very individual ways on R&B and the gospel music he grew up singing in a Pentecostal church: “I know church music better than anything else. That will always be my natural cadence.”Yet his songwriting was also shaped by the classical choral music he performed in high school with the Baltimore City College Choir, an award-winning group that competed internationally. “It made me clear about how I wanted to take up space musically,” he recalled. “It was just brilliant to be 14 years old and to have a Black choral director who was like, ‘OK, we’re going to understand classical music. But you’re also going to understand the value and the importance of Black composers and Black people and Black opera singers.’ And we had to sight-read and do our solfège, and to know how to do transcribing and musical notation — all that stuff.”The music serpentwithfeet makes is immediately distinctive, harnessing his gospel and classical training to a startling emotional openness. He works largely as a one-man studio band, fusing his own vocals, instruments and electronics. And he creates songs that are rhapsodic, pensive, harmonically complex, meticulously orchestrated and, often, constructed with layer upon layer of otherworldly vocals.His phantom chorales, he said, are a way of looking beyond himself. “I think about the idea of the operatic chorus, or the village chorus, where I have my limited perspective and then the chorus has the omniscient perspective,” he said. “I’m thinking about a community when I’m making songs. And I’m thinking about me being the younger person in the community. And then there’s the elders, or the village people, who can see more than what I can see.”Nao, an English R&B songwriter, exchanged collaborations with serpentwithfeet. After they wrote a song for her next album, she added her voice and writing — working remotely, largely by exchanging WhatsApp messages — to “Heart Storm,” a shimmering ballad on “Deacon” that envisions love as a deluge.“He had already created this template, and this really beautiful world. I just had to work my way inside of it,” Nao said from London. “He doesn’t songwrite the linear way that I do. He starts from obscure places, with these poetic sequences I just would never think of. I write the way I speak in a conversation. And he writes like he’s Shakespeare. I’d say he’s the Shakespeare of alternative Black music.”“I want people to feel part of the process, and I want people to feel like the thing they are witnessing is alive.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSampha, another English songwriter, worked with serpentwithfeet and the producer Lil Silva on three songs for “Deacon,” sharing studio jam sessions in London before the quarantine. “He’s got an incredible harmonic brain in terms of the way he can build vocal harmonies and his progressions,” Sampha said by phone from London. “It was really a wonder watching him build things up. And in terms of his voice, it’s a real tool. He really knows how to use it, how to bend it, how to make it go straight as an arrow if he needs to.”Sampha also heard early versions of other songs from the album. “It felt like he was making a real conscious effort,” he said. “Not necessarily turning away from the darkness, but acknowledging the light.”“Blisters,” serpentwithfeet’s first release, had ended with songs titled “Penance” and “Redemption.” He opened “Soil” with “Whisper,” which promised, “You can place your burden on my chest,” and later in the album, in the post-breakup throes of “Mourning Song,” he crooned, “I want to make a pageant of my grief.”But in mid-2020 serpentwithfeet signaled a change in tone. “I needed a pivot,” he said. He released an EP, “Apparition,” that set out to exorcise “those ghosts or those spirits or those ideas that don’t serve me at all,” he said. It started with “A Comma,” which declared, “Life’s gotta get easier/No heavy hearts in my next year.”“I’m not sure how many people care about the arc of my life,” he said. “But with my own personal document, I didn’t want to go down in history as the sad boy, because I’ve just experienced so much joy.”Singles released in advance of “Deacon” announced a new playfulness in serpentwithfeet’s music. In “Same Size Shoe,” which delights in finding similarities with a lover, he suddenly turns his voice into a scat-singing trumpet section. In “Fellowship,” he, Sampha and Lil Silva shake and tap all sorts of percussion as they share a jovial refrain, “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends.”Three songs on the album — “Malik,” “Amir” and “Derrick’s Beard” — name men the singer lusts for. They are “men from my imagination,” he said. “People ask, ‘Who was this song about?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, part of it, I was talking to myself, and the other part, I was talking to a person in my head.’ I think sometimes people just think that everything’s autobiographical, but for me, it’s, like, ‘Well, this happened to me. I wonder what would happen if I augmented this scenario? What would happen if I threw this off the edge of the cliff?’ I try to use all my experiences as a diving board, or as the beginning of a question.”While serpentwithfeet’s own story is full of singular details — Baltimore, the church, the classical choir, Blackness, sexuality — none of them, he believes, should separate anyone from his music. “The brilliant thing about individual stories is that the more specific you are, the more universal it is,” he said. “There’s a lot of artists that I connect with and I can’t identify with necessarily. But I can identify with that human feeling of love in the club, or missing your partner, or hope when you get to visit that country one more time.”He added, “They say gay artists don’t make universal work. That’s a lie. I’ve really listened to a lot of straight music. And I enjoy, and I can identify with being heterosexual. I don’t know what that is like. That ain’t my story. But I can still shed a tear.”He expects his own songs to reach everyone. “I want to be an incredible facilitator,” he said. “I won’t say storyteller because I want the audience to participate with me. I want people to feel part of the process, and I want people to feel like the thing they are witnessing is alive. I want to make work that people feel part of, that people feel like ‘serpent needed me here.’ Like ‘If I didn’t listen to this album, it wouldn’t exist.’ I want everybody to feel like it’s theirs, which is a very particular art form.”“I don’t know if I have accomplished it,” He added. “But that is something that I’m in pursuit of.” More

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      in Television

      How Britain Is Reacting to ‘It’s a Sin’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Britain Is Reacting to ‘It’s a Sin’The show, which aired last month in the U.K., has broken a viewing record and revived conversations about how the country handled the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.From left, Omari Douglas, Lydia West, David Carlyle, Calum Scott Howells and Nathaniel Curtis in “It’s a Sin.”Credit… Ben Blackall/HBO MaxFeb. 22, 2021Updated 12:39 p.m. ETLONDON — In what may be a perfect formula for helping a well-made TV show go viral, all five episodes of “It’s a Sin” arrived on a British streaming service in late January, on the Friday before a snowy weekend, during a national lockdown.Since becoming available on HBO Max on Thursday, viewers in the U.S. have been binge watching the show, but in Britain, the show has dominated national conversations over recent weeks.The drama, created by Russell T Davies, tells the story of a group of friends navigating gay life in 1980s London, as AIDS moves from a whispered American illness to a defining aspect of their young lives. Episodes aired weekly on television on Channel 4, and the show broke records for the channel’s accompanying streaming service, with 16 million streams.Below is a roundup of how people in Britain have been reacting to “It’s a Sin,” including sharing their own experiences of the AIDS crisis, improving understanding of the H.I.V. treatments available today and lamenting the epidemic’s absence from school curriculums. This piece contains some spoilers.A critical successDavies has had a long and celebrated career in British television, including the relaunch of “Doctor Who” and making other hit L.G.B.T.Q. shows like “Queer as Folk” and “Cucumber.”“It’s a Sin” earned numerous five star reviews from British critics, along with praise for Davies’s writing. In The Telegraph, Anita Singh noted that he makes viewers “care about these characters from the first minute we see them,” adding that “as in so much of his work, he switches seamlessly between tragedy and humor.”In the show, activists stage a “die in” in London to protest the government’s handling of the AIDS crisis.Credit…Ben Blackall/HBO MaxWriting in The Times of London, Hugo Rifkind said, “It is a drama that could only have been made once stories of gay love and gay lives had become an uncontroversial fixture of mainstream popular culture, and it’s obviously thanks in large part to Davies that they have.”There was also praise for the actors’ performances, and how relatable many of the characters felt. In the TV magazine Radio Times, David Craig saw himself in multiple characters.“I remember feeling the same timidity as Colin (Callum Scott Howells) when I first attempted to explore my sexuality,” he wrote. “Likewise, I can recall making fraught phone calls home while still closeted, unable to discuss that which was truly weighing on my mind, similar to Ritchie (Olly Alexander).”Discussions of H.I.V. today“It’s a Sin” has also sparked a renewed public focus on H.I.V. prevention and treatment. The Terrence Higgins Trust, an H.I.V. and sexual health charity, said it had seen a huge boost in donations through its website, a boost to the number of H.I.V. tests requested at the start of H.I.V. Testing Week and a 30 percent increase in calls to its help line.“It’s genuinely been phenomenal,” Ian Green, the chief executive of the charity, said in a telephone interview. “It’s rekindled the narrative around H.I.V. in the United Kingdom.”On the popular daytime show “This Morning” a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Ranj, one of the show’s contributors, took an H.I.V. test live on air. Nathaniel J. Hall, who plays Donald in “It’s a Sin,” talked about living with H.I.V. on the chat show Lorraine. “I’m on medication and my viral load is what is known as undetectable,” he said. “That means I can’t transmit the virus on, so my partner, Sean, remains H.I.V. negative.”After concerns were raised that the drama could lead to misconceptions around contemporary H.I.V. treatments, Channel 4 now advises viewers after each episode on where to find further information.A celebration of ‘Jills’“It’s a Sin” has also sparked praise for the allies of people affected by the disease: friends who visit people in hospital when their families failed to turn up, march in protest and campaign on behalf of H.I.V.-positive people.The character of Jill (Lydia West) embodies these loyal friends, and is loosely based on a real woman, Jill Nalder, who lived in London in the ’80s and is a friend of Davies. On the show, Nalder plays the character of Jill’s mother. Remembering the period in the Metro newspaper, she wrote: “The L.G.B.T.Q. community ought to be remembered as trailblazers because not only were they fighting for their lives, they were medical guinea pigs — sometimes taking 30 pills a day just to survive.”Jill (Lydia West), right, is a loyal friend to Ritchie (Olly Alexander) throughout the years. Credit… Ben Blackall/HBO Max“If you are a gay man, I hope you have a Jill,” wrote Guy Pewsey in Grazia.However, some viewers have been frustrated at the lack of representation of women affected by AIDS in the show. Lizbeth Farooqi, a fictional Muslim lawyer played by Seyan Sarvan, is one example, but is a relatively minor character. “It infuriates me that a lot of coverage of the show has concentrated Jill as the avatar of good womanhood and being this lovely, soft, supportive person,” Lisa Power, a co-founder of the British L.G.B.T.Q. charity Stonewall, told The Guardian. “I want to hear more about the stroppy lesbian solicitor, who most people have not even managed to read as a lesbian.”Institutionalized stigmaThe drama also touches on legislation around the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Britain at the time. In particular, the consequences of Section 28, a 1988 law introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government banning teaching that promoted the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”In one scene, Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) is asked to check a school library’s books to make sure they comply with the law, only to find that they did. “I looked at all the vast halls of literature and culture and science and art,” he said. “There is nothing.”Section 28 was repealed in 2003, but some say its consequences are still being felt in Britain today. Speaking to The Telegraph, Howells, who plays Colin, lamented that the AIDS crisis was not taught in schools. “Why? How? How can this thing happen, literally kill millions of people, and yet they can’t even implement it in education?” he asked.Some people have also drawn parallels between the stigma that gay, lesbian and bisexual people received in the 1980s and the experience of trans people in Britain today. On Twitter Michael Cashman, another of Stonewall’s co-founders, wrote that some lesbian, gay and bisexual people who lived through that period “are now visiting the same stigmatization, misrepresentation and dehumanization of trans people particularly trans women.”The power of ‘La’During the first episode of the show, Ritchie steps in front of a crowd at a house party, dressed in drag, to sing just one syllable: “La!”“Is that it?” someone in the crowd shouts back. His friends react in hysterics. From that point onward, the characters say “La!” as a greeting and a goodbye. Speaking to “It’s a Sin: After Hours,” an accompanying Channel 4 show, Davies said that “La” was a joke among his friends when he was growing up in Swansea.Philip Normal, a London artist, decided to make and sell a T-shirt emblazoned with the word, with proceeds going to the Terrence Higgins Trust. “For me, it really underpins the love the characters have in the show and the respect and love that I’ve experienced in the L.G.B.T. community when I moved to London as a young gay man,” he said in a telephone interview.He said he had now raised £200,000 for the charity, adding: “I didn’t think it was going to take off! I thought I would sell, like five.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Better Than Besties: Why Gay Holiday Films Matter

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReporter’s NotebookBetter Than Besties: Why Gay Holiday Films MatterThis season’s movies with queer characters may be a largely chaste affair, but their comforting formulas also tell L.G.B.T.Q. viewers that they are seen.Heath (Juan Pablo Di Pace), left, and Wyatt (Peter Porte) get romantic in “Dashing in December,” on the Paramount Network. Credit…Paramount NetworkDec. 18, 2020, 12:59 p.m. ETI gasped so loudly, it sounded like Judy Garland had shown up at my Christmas party.It happened during “Dashing in December,” a new holiday film on the Paramount Network about two men who fall in love on a ranch. I involuntarily inhaled as Wyatt, a stuffy venture capitalist, locked lips with Heath, the sweetheart ranch hand. Watching it made me feel like Santa put me at the top of his nice list.I’m gay. I kiss men. Never at a ranch, once at a Denny’s. But there was something so surprisingly renegade about the movie’s smooch. Leading men just don’t kiss each other in the conservative fraternity of holiday TV movies.They do now. As I recently reported, this year there are six new holiday-themed films with gay and lesbian leading characters, including “Happiest Season” (Hulu), “The Christmas House” (Hallmark Channel) and “The Christmas Setup” (Lifetime). In this chaste genre, that’s a milestone.Nia Fairweather thinks so, too. She plays an Afro-Latina woman of fluid sexuality in the new indie “A New York Christmas Wedding,” now on Netflix.“There’s a list — a list — where there never was a list,” Fairweather said. “That lets us know this year has been different.”This change is significant for me, a holiday movie fan whose biggest gay Christmas memory is George Michael gazing lovingly at Andrew Ridgeley on the cover of the Wham! album “Last Christmas.” But as I reported the article, I wondered if I was overstating the arrival of a New Queer Christmas Cinema. Will we look back on horrible 2020 — as I think we will — as the year that finally gayed up Christmas movies?I called up holiday movie aficionados to ask: Is this a big deal?Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis in “Happiest Season” on Hulu.Credit…Hulu, via Associated Press“This is a big deal,” replied Joanna Wilson, the author of several books about Christmastime entertainment. “Queer people have been bosses and co-workers and siblings of the main characters. Being the central romance is very exciting and comes not a moment too soon.”Blake Lee, who stars with his husband, Ben Lewis, in “The Christmas Setup,” framed it as an answer to a chaotic 2020.“We are four years into a presidency that has attacked the L.G.B.T.Q. community and projected hate,” Lee said. “I feel like these writers with these stories were like, now’s the time.”What holiday films provide — nostalgia, predictable formulas and an escape from real-world adversities like Covid-19, bankruptcy, bigotry — can be especially comforting to queer people, said Michael Varrati, the screenwriter of several holiday films, including the new “Christmas With a Crown.”“Movie Christmas is a lot different than real Christmas,” Varrati said. “Not everybody has a great relationship with their family or has pristine memories of yesteryear.” In holiday movies, he added, queer people “get to live in the Christmas they always wanted or didn’t get to have.”Jake Helgren told me he wrote and directed “Dashing in December” as an Americana romance and a “love letter to the ending” he wanted in “Brokeback Mountain.” Lawrence Humphreys, the film’s production designer, said the set was a teary mess as he and other crew members, straight and gay, watched the leading men kiss.“We knew what we created was something beautiful,” said Humphreys, who has worked on several Christmas films. “It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever been a part of and the one I’m most proud of.”L.G.B.T.Q. holiday entertainment has roots in the days when the word “queer” landed with a punch to the face. Performers surreptitiously conveyed stereotypical gayness — through winks, camp, sass, frippery — that was evident to in-the-know audiences but sailed over others’ heads. Liberace’s television show featured a Christmas episode in 1954. Paul Lynde starred in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” a 1977 ABC special. That same year, “All in the Family” ran groundbreaking Christmastime episodes about the murder of Edith Bunker’s friend Beverly LaSalle, who refers to herself as a transvestite. (She was played by Lori Shannon, the drag stage name of Don McLean.)L.G.B.T.Q. characters are now regulars on holiday-themed TV. But until this year, queer leads in holiday movies were few, relegated to low-budget indies like “Too Cool for Christmas” (2004), which was also released in a straight version, and “Make the Yuletide Gay” (2009). Supporting queer characters were mostly on the sidelines and white. That changed this year, as actors of color took on leading roles, including Fairweather, who is Afro-Caribbean, and Juan Pablo Di Pace, the Latino actor who plays Heath in “Dashing in December.” Transgender characters and actors are still rare, though.Ben Lewis, left, and Blake Lee in “The Christmas Setup” on Lifetime.Credit…Albert Camicioli/LifetimeSo is sex. Couples of all orientations rarely get heavier than a kiss in mainstream holiday fare. “Dashing in December” is a little more sexually adventurous, and by adventurous I mean a scene in which Wyatt, in just underwear, encounters a wet Heath in a towel. By the chaste standards of holiday rom-coms, “Dashing in December” is “Cruising.”And yet — it’s not. What you won’t see in these new films are activists, leathermen, butches or foul-mouthed drag queens. That’s not the Lifetime or Hallmark brand, so that’s no shock. But that’s what happens with assimilation. If gay people want straight people to believe our love deserves a holiday movie, don’t be surprised when straight people expect that movie to look like theirs.To counter the new gay sweetness, I binged renegade holiday movies about queer people who are raunchy, vulgar, camp, deranged. Or as BenDeLaCreme, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star, put it: “the beautiful, bizarre things that queer people exposed themselves to when they had to search harder.” BenDeLaCreme is doing her part with a saucy new holiday special on Hulu with the “Drag Race” Season 5 winner Jinkx Monsoon.Whatever the opposite of “The Christmas House” is, I watched it. There was “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998), a Peter Bogdanovich film that used the fear of an Andrew Cunanan-style gay serial killer in service of a lurid thriller. On Amazon, the ensemble dramedy “Some of My Best Friends Are …” (1971) was set on Christmas Eve at a bustling Greenwich Village gay bar, featuring moving performances from Rue McClanahan and Candy Darling. (This paper called it “a very sad gay movie.”)The value in these films — as grim and mirthless as they may seem — is that they paved the way for “Happiest Season.” They are historical benchmarks showing that L.G.B.T.Q. performers and creators made Christmas entertainment because — surprise! — they loved Christmas, despite the Scrooges who said they didn’t belong there.My binge ended with “Letters to Satan Claus,” a new horror satire on Syfy about a girl who misspells her letter to St. Nick and instead summons the Angel of Death. Featuring a same-sex subplot, a trans actor (Xavier Lopez) and a nonbinary Santa creature, it’s Christmas counterprogramming at its queerest.Yet Mike Zara, who wrote the film, seemed perfectly Hallmark as he talked about what inspired the story.“It’s about finding joy through tragedy and darkness,” he said. “That sounds corny, but I wanted to talk about all the scars we carry with us. We can embrace them but also not live in that darkness forever.”Sounds like a New Year’s resolution to me.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      New Star of ‘The Prom’ Sees a Chance to Make L.G.B.T.Q. Characters Visible

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew Star of ‘The Prom’ Sees a Chance to Make L.G.B.T.Q. Characters VisibleLike her character, Jo Ellen Pellman identifies as queer, and she is making her film debut in the Netflix musical alongside A-listers like Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.“It’s the best feeling in the world knowing I can bring my authentic self to the role,” Jo Ellen Pellman said of “The Prom.”Credit…Da’Shaunae Marisa for The New York TimesPublished More

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      Same-Sex Kisses Under the Mistletoe: Holiday Movies Rethink a Formula

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySame-Sex Kisses Under the Mistletoe: Holiday Movies Rethink a FormulaIn a conservative genre that has mainly told straight stories, six new films, including titles on Hallmark and Lifetime, center on gay or lesbian characters.With Daniel Levy by their side, Kristen Stewart, center, and Mackenzie Davis play a couple in “Happiest Season.”  Credit…Lacey Terrell/Hulu, via Associated PressDec. 11, 2020, 4:36 p.m. ETWill the adorable couple adopt a baby in time to celebrate Christmas with Mom and Dad and the neighborhood kids? Sounds like a delightful holiday TV movie. But this is disruptive 2020, so here’s the thing: the couple are Brandon and Jake and the channel is Hallmark.“The Christmas House” is one of six new original holiday films released since November with something rare: main characters in same-sex relationships. Others include Hulu’s “Happiest Season,” a lesbian coming-out comedy starring Kristen Stewart; “The Christmas Setup,” a Lifetime rom-com debuting Saturday and starring the real-life husbands Ben Lewis and Blake Lee; and “Dashing in December,” a drama starting Sunday on the Paramount Network about two men who fall in love on a ranch.More under the radar but still noteworthy are two indies: “A New York Christmas Wedding,” a drama on Netflix about a woman who has relationships with both a man and a woman, and the scrappy on-demand “I Hate New Year’s” (for rent on major platforms), a lesbian romance set on New Year’s Eve in Nashville.L.G.B.T.Q. characters aren’t new to holiday movies, and six films may not sound like a revolution. But so many leading queer love stories — and same-sex kisses! — is a sea change for Christmas cinema, a conventionally heterosexual universe with more stories about puppies than gay people.“It’s the start of something bigger,” said Clea DuVall, the director and co-writer of “Happiest Season.” She added, “Networks and streamers are starting to see the value in telling these stories that have always been there but were not given the platform to get out to wider audiences.”According to Hulu, “Happiest Season” is the first holiday rom-com about a same-sex couple from a major Hollywood studio. Nicole Brown, the president of TriStar Pictures, which sold “Happiest Season” to Hulu in October, called the queering of the Christmas picture “very organic.” So what took so long?“Film has always been under the assumption that the safest kind of characters are the way to go,” Brown said. “Our studio felt confident that the script and Clea’s vision and her ambition were aligned to make a commercial story, and that the quality of her storytelling would bring everybody in. When something’s great, it’s great.”This shift is most seismic for Hallmark, which has become shorthand for “holiday movie.” “The Christmas House” is one of 40 new holiday films released this year on the Hallmark Channel and its sister network Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, the leaders in the holiday moviemaking machine. What’s most striking about “The Christmas House” is that Brandon and Jake, played by Jonathan Bennett and Brad Harder, are unconditionally accepted as part of the family.L.G.B.T.Q. people “work on a lot of these Christmas movies,” said Bennett, who is gay but has played straight in Hallmark films before. “For the first time we feel we belong at the holiday table.”Last December, the Hallmark Channel faced a firestorm when it pulled four television ads with kissing brides after a conservative group petitioned the network to “reconsider airing commercials with same-sex couples” and to refrain from adding L.G.B.T.Q. movies to its schedule. Days later, Hallmark apologized for removing the commercials, and said it would work with GLAAD, the media advocacy organization, “to better represent the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity at Crown Media Family Networks, the parent company of the Hallmark Channel, said in an interview that her chief goal this year was to make “a bigger holiday table where people can see themselves on TV.” In 2021, Hallmark “will be moving forward, not backward,” she said, with more L.G.B.T.Q. tales at Christmas and during the year.“We are really focused on continuing our commitment to the authenticity in our storytelling for all of our characters, and making sure that everyone can see themselves represented on Hallmark services,” she said. “It’s the right thing to do.”Jonathan Bennett, center, and Brad Harder in “The Christmas House.”Credit…Hallmark ChannelLifetime, Hallmark’s biggest Christmas competitor, has featured original holiday films with L.G.B.T.Q. characters in supporting roles and story lines before; last year for the first time it ran one with a same-sex kiss. But “The Christmas Setup” — one of 34 new holiday movies on Lifetime this year — breaks ground as the channel’s first such film with an L.G.B.T.Q. romance front and center.Tanya Lopez, Lifetime’s executive vice president of movies, limited series and original movie acquisitions, said having gay leading characters in a film was “an incredible positive.” But the real breakthrough?“Remember when we would lower our voices and say a movie has a very special holiday twist?” she whispered. “We’re not doing a very special kind of Christmas.” Gay characters “being treated normal in storytelling is what feels fresh,” she added, “and that’s the norm I want to create.”Holiday TV movies generally follow a formula — a young city gal unexpectedly finds love with a small-town handyman or prince in disguise. Viewers show no signs of fatigue with that basic plot, and it’s a pretty white world. But while racial diversity has become more prevalent in the genre, if only a little, queer representation has not kept pace with even that minimal progress.Guaranteed, aspirational feel-good: that’s the name of the holiday movie game, said Joanna Wilson, the author of the Christmas entertainment encyclopedia “Tis the Season TV.”“These movies are fantasies where the real world doesn’t exist,” said Wilson, who also runs the blog ChristmasTVHistory.com. “Families don’t worry about different political viewpoints or health care. These are very cautious, conservative stories to begin with. But changes are coming, and that matters.”Wilson traces the holiday TV bonanza to ABC’s “Carol for Another Christmas,” a 20th-century “Christmas Carol” written by Rod Serling and broadcast in 1964. Original holiday films blossomed on the networks in the ’70s and ’80s, and in the ’90s, cable TV first marketed them as niche programming, Wilson said. This year, there are an estimated 115 new holiday movies on cable and major streaming platforms, including original films on Fox Nation, the Fox News streaming service.If ratings are an indication, the move toward L.G.B.T.Q. story lines isn’t a fluke. Hallmark said “The Christmas House” attracted over two million total viewers in its premiere last month. “Happiest Season” got the biggest audience for any Hulu original film in its opening weekend, according to Hulu.Complaints remain. One Million Moms, the conservative group that took credit for Hallmark’s decision to pull ads last year, is boycotting the company. Some L.G.B.T.Q. advocates are dissatisfied that the husbands in “The Christmas House” take more of a back seat to the film’s straight romance. There’s also disappointment that trans characters and actors are scarce.But for holiday movie fans like Kevin A. Barry, a higher education administrator in West Hollywood, Calif., there’s joy in knowing the days are numbered for watching only straight people smooch under a snow-coated gazebo.“We’ve always had to fight for love,” Barry said. “These movies remind us that love always wins.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More