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From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home in Old Windsor, England, on March 1, 2021. New Friends The rising star and the established icon who’ve discovered they have a lot in common. From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home […] More
John Wells discussed the impact of the pandemic and police protests on Sunday’s series finale.This interview includes spoilers for Sunday’s series finale of “Shameless.”Before he created “Shameless,” the long-running family drama that ended Sunday night on Showtime, John Wells was the showrunner of “ER” and later seasons of “The West Wing,” both on NBC.Though the shows are superficially dissimilar, Wells sees all of them as examinations of function — or dysfunction. “ER” is about how medicine works. “The West Wing” is about how government works. And “Shameless”?“That’s about how the system doesn’t really work for families living near the poverty line,” Wells said. “Man, talk about that being underrepresented on television! That is a huge portion of our society that we don’t tell nearly enough stories about.”Over 11 seasons, “Shameless” conveyed the outrageous and topical stories of the Gallaghers, a sprawling family with largely absent addict parents Frank and Monica (played by William H. Macy and Chloe Webb), leaving the daughter Fiona (Emmy Rossum) to raise her younger siblings Lip (Jeremy Allen White), Ian (Cameron Monaghan), Debbie (Emma Kenney), Carl (Ethan Cutkosky) and Liam (Christian Isaiah).Based on a British TV series, the Showtime version transferred the scruffy family to the South Side of Chicago and, among other things, thoroughly modernized the British concept of “kitchen-sink drama.” The Gallagher kitchen hosted such events as Monica slicing her wrists, Fiona having impromptu sex, Debbie giving birth, Frank removing Debbie’s necrotic toes and then-toddler Liam collapsing from a cocaine overdose.“Comedy can be brutal,” Wells said. “It can reach past our reluctance of being preached to.”“Shameless,” he added, is “a show about a family trying to survive and laughing their way through it.”Wells would have been happy to continue relating the Gallaghers’ misadventures — while addressing weighty topical issues like inequality, gentrification, addiction, mental illness and sexuality — for “another 20 years.” But Showtime gave the show a final season just before the coronavirus pandemic. Then three days before shooting began, in which the mostly grown-up Gallaghers finally disperse, production was shut down for months.During the unexpected time off, Wells rethought the season and decided to incorporate the pandemic, using Frank, who was long past his sell-by date for various medical reasons, as the poster boy for anti-maskers. In Sunday’s series finale, Frank died of Covid.“We weren’t trying to do a ‘Very Special Episode,’” Wells said. “Even in comedies that are satirical, there should be real consequences.”In a phone interview from Victoria, British Columbia, where he’s working on a new series for Netflix, Wells discussed the inspiration for Frank’s death, Fiona’s near-return and the legacy of “Shameless.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Frank has so many possible comorbidities,” Wells said. “Covid is just the thing that finally pushed him over the edge.”Paul Sarkis/ShowtimeYou rewrote the entire season after the shutdown. Was Frank destined to die all along? How did you decide he would get Covid? There have been plenty of Covid-19 subplots on TV but I can’t think of another lead character who actually died from it.We didn’t want Frank to get off scot-free for all his lifestyle choices. We were always planning for him to pass away from something at the end. Originally, we were thinking he would take his own life in an overdose. What the hell — why not go out in a blaze of glory?Then I lost a close family member from Covid at Christmastime. That’s happening to lots of families. So I thought, “We should make a comment on that.” We tried to make a comment all season on the particular difficulties that the pandemic has presented in low-income communities, and still make it kind of funny. To have Frank die of something else in the midst of this pandemic, it would be a little too easy. Frank has so many possible comorbidities — Covid is just the thing that finally pushed him over the edge. There’s certainly some schadenfreude in this, Frank always thinking he can skate by everything and coming to a moment he couldn’t skate by.In his delirium, Frank mistakes a health care worker for Fiona, which is the first time that she has been mentioned since Emmy Rossum left the show two years ago. Why haven’t the Gallaghers talked about their sister? The house is in Fiona’s name, and she remains Liam’s legal guardian.We had written in various mentions of Fiona over the last two years, but Showtime asked us not to remind people of her absence. I think they were very concerned that Emmy’s absence would significantly hurt the viewership of the show.We very much wanted to try and bring back Fiona for the finale, but there was just no way to make it all work with the pandemic. I’m sure Emmy would have come back and done it, and it would have been nice to see her again. But she had some health concerns about returning, quarantining and trying to be safe. It’s hard to question anybody’s choices based on travel and safety.There was going to be a family discussion about who was going to take care of Frank. In the early ideas of the story, that was a perfect way to have Fiona return. We had some humorous versions of it, where they all got sick of Frank, put him in a box and sent him down to Florida. And then Fiona opened the box! Best laid plans.Did Showtime ever veto any other ideas or voice other concerns?It was kind of our inside joke: “You can do about anything, but you can’t steal a library book.” I think that was because [Showtime co-president of entertainment] Gary Levine didn’t want to encourage people to actually keep library books. [Laughs.] Showtime expressed concern about various things that then they ultimately supported, like Frank sending Carl to cancer camp. The idea was that every kid should be able to go to camp.In the early days, we had a lot of conversations about Frank choosing to sleep with Lip’s girlfriend Karen (Laura Slade Wiggins). Then we came up with the solution of how Frank would seek forgiveness, how Lip would urinate on Frank’s head and Frank would actually accept it, because he realized he deserved it. It was always about the balance of what’s been done and what we leave unpunished and unforgiven in the family, because the show is really just about how a family can pull itself through all different kinds of crisis.In its final season, “Shameless” sought to reflect the losses many families have experienced during the pandemic.Paul Sarkis/ShowtimeWas there ever a story that you wished you had contextualized more?Carl’s story line, becoming a cop. We could have used two more seasons to explore that. We had a lot of conversations with Showtime about how much we could say. It was a fine line, trying to ride an ongoing conversation in the country.How much did the Black Lives Matter protests and the ongoing national conversation about racial inequality influence what you had originally planned?Carl’s story line became far more topical. Not that these issues weren’t always there, but they became front and center after a number of horrific incidents of police brutality. What is proper policing? Is the purpose of the police to protect the well-off from the not-well-off? There are certainly many people who believe that. That’s an oversimplification, but we all need to understand what those fears of the police are, the lack of trust that exists in a lot of communities.We were also trying to address things about lack of housing. One thing I wish we had another year to explore was the eviction moratorium expiring, when we discover just how many people have lost their jobs and live with food insecurity. I’d love to be talking about pandemic checks, and what a huge difference affordable day care would make to Debbie and Tami (Kate Miner). We’d find the humor in these stories but these are life-and-death issues for families who live on the margin.Why do you think “Shameless” wasn’t part of a larger cultural conversation, particularly during awards seasons?I never want to complain about it, because I’ve been on the good side of that equation. But I would say that when you’re doing stories about people who are less fortunate, if you’re not providing easy answers, the shows tend to get overlooked a bit more. I don’t have any explanation for why “The Wire” was never the most decorated show in television history. We want to pretend that the country is egalitarian, that it’s a meritocracy, that everybody has the same opportunities, and it’s just not true. That’s hard for us to accept. It challenges our sense of who we are. What are our responsibilities to each other?There was some backlash. Critics did not latch onto the show at the beginning. Many people wanted to write off “Shameless” as a sex comedy. And that’s OK. We had a great, loyal audience for a long time. People would stop me on the street and tell me that Frank was like their dad. Kids would come to our Chicago set, and tell us about how they were thrown out of their homes for being gay, lesbian or trans. People would tell us how their big sister raised them, or how they reconnected with older siblings because of the show. We all search for community, and the Gallagher world was a community of kids who cared about each other.What would you want to see in a “Shameless” spinoff?I want to see the Alibi cop-bar story, and what happens with Carl and Arthur (Joshua Malina) as police officers. I love Kevin (Steve Howey) and Veronica (Shanola Hampton), and would love to see what happens to them. Lip was on the verge of actually figuring things out and succeeding. We have a massive legion of fans for Ian and Mickey (Noel Fisher), so seeing where their life goes. For many people, they represent different ideas of who gay men can be and how those relationships can be.We did what we set out to do. Hopefully people enjoyed it, saw some of their own hardships in it, or have a little more empathy for the tens of millions of people in America who live at the poverty level that the Gallaghers lived at in the show. Tip your waiter a little bit more. Leave some extra money for the maid when you stay at a hotel or motel. Be a little more understanding with the person who delivers your package. Try and walk in other people’s shoes.Having all these stories out there reminds people that the things that they might be ashamed of and feel need to be hidden, nah — we’ve got to talk about it. More
The new film “Moffie” examines the brainwashing of a generation of white men in the twilight of the apartheid regime.“Mo-FFIES!” chant the soldiers, precisely lined up under a baking sun, as a screaming sergeant reviles two men reported to be lovers. “Mo-ffies! Mo-ffies! Mo-ffies!”The word is a homophobic slur in Afrikaans, and the scene comes about 30 minutes into Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “Moffie.” It depicts South Africa in the early 1980s, when the country’s white government saw threats from the communists at the border, terrorists at home and the anti-apartheid movement worldwide. Every white man over 16 had to do two years of military service, and “Moffie” suggests the story of a generation through the shy recruit Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He endures the brutal basic training designed to brainwash the young men into a paranoid, aggressive defense of the apartheid regime, and is sent to fight on the border, while quietly experiencing an awakening of sexual identity in the worst possible context.“A scarringly brilliant anatomy of white South African masculinity,” Guy Lodge wrote in Variety upon the film’s premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. It was equally well reviewed in South Africa before its distribution was derailed by the pandemic. The drama is reaching American theaters and video on demand on April 9.Telling a story set in the apartheid era from a white point of view was not an obvious choice for the Cape Town-born Hermanus, 37, who is mixed race (known as “colored” in South Africa), and did not join the army.“I did wonder whether my first film set in the apartheid era could really be about white South African men as victims of apartheid,” Hermanus said in an interview in London, where he is about to begin filming an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” written by Kazuo Ishiguro. “It’s not quite doing Winnie or Nelson Mandela!”Kai Luke Brummer plays a South African conscript uncertain of his sexuality.IFC FilmsIt was the title that intrigued the South African-born producer Eric Abraham (“Ida”), when he chanced upon the novel “Moffie” by André Carl van der Merwe a few years ago in London. “Anyone who has grown up in South Africa knows the power of that word to hurt,” he said in an interview. “It was the most demeaning, derogatory term you could come up with, used by white people to intimidate and de-select those who they feared infecting their ideology.”Abraham and his fellow producer Jack Sidey approached Hermanus, whose 2011 film, “Beauty,” they admired. He was initially skeptical. “In South Africa, you always arrive with a racial perspective, and that’s how I first thought about ‘Moffie,’” he said. “But something about it gripped me, and I realized that it is really about shame and indoctrination.”The word, he added, is equally vicious for a straight or gay man, “because it identifies you as an outsider, a man who does not embody the qualities of the strong hypermasculine dominator.”After working with two writers, Hermanus and Sidey eventually wrote the script together, moving away from the novel’s more personal love story. “I was more interested in the hurt and indoctrination than the protagonist’s catharsis,” Hermanus said. “I didn’t want to make another gay-centric relationship drama set in the army. I wanted it to be a serious portrait of this generation.”Hermanus obliquely and subtly evokes Nicholas’s shifting emotions, as the soldier gradually forms a silent attachment to a fellow conscript, Dylan Stassen (Ryan de Villiers). The price of expressing such feelings is made clear in that early scene when the two lovers, bloodied and trembling, are taunted and humiliated. Later, we learn they have been sent to the fearsome Ward 22, where they are the subject of brutal experimental treatments intended to cure homosexuals, drug addicts and others deemed to be deviant.“It was very important to both Oliver and me that Nicholas wasn’t certain of his sexuality,” Brummer said in a video interview from Cape Town. “His focus is survival, finding out how to fit in, and in finding Dylan something in him ignites, and his understanding of the world shifts.”The deep social repression of sexuality and of otherness is evoked midway through the film in a brightly colored, sun-dappled flashback to a childhood experience of humiliation, which Hermanus drew from his own memories. It is shot in a single take, one of several unpredictable cinematic decisions that inflect the movie. “We set a lot of rules beforehand about our choices, but sometimes you just surrender to what is there,” said Jamie D. Ramsay, the director of photography, who had worked with Hermanus on two previous films. “Oliver is brave and will commit and say, ‘OK that’s the shot.’”The director was initially skeptical of a film about apartheid told from a white perspective. “In South Africa, you always arrive with a racial perspective, and that’s how I first thought about ‘Moffie,’” he said.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesHermanus, who was 11 when apartheid ended, said that he had always been obsessed with films, shooting his first movie — “a horror movie, terrible, starring my cousin” — at 13. After earning a degree in film and media studies from the University of Cape Town, he worked at a film production company (“as a slave”) eventually becoming a newspaper photographer. All the time, he said, “I wanted to be a filmmaker, and was living through a depression as a colored South African who just didn’t know how to make that happen.”A chance meeting with the director Roland Emmerich and his cinematographer, Ueli Steiger, in a Cape Town restaurant led to a friendship that changed everything. “One day Roland said to me, if you can get in to film school, I’ll give you a scholarship,” Hermanus recounted. “Somehow they saw something in me; it’s a perfect example of what it means to invest in people.”Hermanus went to the London Film School for three years, and made the full-length “Shirley Adams” as his graduation movie. “You are supposed to make a short film, but I wore them out,” Hermanus said. The film’s critical success in South Africa and abroad led to the invitation of a residency in Cannes, where he began to work on “Beauty,” a study of a gay obsession in a tight Afrikaans community.Like Hermanus’s other films, “Moffie” is the product of what he describes as “forensic” preparation. He researched the era, helped by Ramsay, who had collected images of the South African border war in the ’70s and ’80s before he was involved with the movie. And the director met regularly with the actors for months, working out their back stories, then sent them to a boot camp for a week.“Oliver created an environment in which anything was possible because we understood our characters and that world,” Hilton Pelser, who plays the terrifying Sergeant Brand, said in a video interview. “I came to understand what Brand is trying to do; in a very dark, very violent way, he is trying to save their lives.”The movie, Hermanus said, is a reflection of the crumbling of apartheid, the moment when the minority government cranked up fear and distrust because it was losing its grip. There are very few Black figures in the movie, and all are the brief subject of violence or contempt. “I wanted the film to be from the perspective of white South Africa,” Hermanus said, “and that was its reality.”Despite that perspective, Hermanus feels “Moffie” resonates in broader ways. “I see it as a portrait of the factory, how men were being made in the service of an ideology,” he said. “That relates to their treatment of women, their treatment of other races, how they potentially become the men we identify as problematic today.”Apartheid, he added, “isn’t one face. It’s a bit like World War II — there are lots of different films you could make. ‘Moffie’ is about just one facet of that history: the beginning of the end.” More
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
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
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
#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
#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
