Bonus video! My So-Called Life's 90s Costume Inspiration, and PBS's Gay Past
Added 2024-10-06 16:00:15 +0000 UTCHello there!
I'm coming to you from the road this week, with a bonus video about two very different topics: First, from my most recent YouTube video, some details about the very 90s fashion on My So-Called Life (and the unlikely career of the show's wardrobe guy); and second, as a preview of my next upcoming video, a quick look into the SUPER GAY past of public television. I'm gathering research for a video about the miniseries Tales of the City, which put some very sexy gay love scenes on TV in the 90s that caused a mini-meltdown behind office doors in Congress.
I'll have lots more details about that in the coming weeks -- in the mean time, if you want to read Wilson Cruz's great Vulture interview, here it is: https://www.vulture.com/2014/09/wilson-cruz-my-so-called-life-1994-1995.html
(It's behind a paywall, but you can read it if you put your browser in incognito mode.)
Also! I'll be on CNN tonight! They're airing my episode of the docu-series TV on the Edge, in which I talk all about Ellen's big gay coming-out episode. It airs tonight at 9pm on CNN, and I'm told it'll be available to stream via HBO (or Max or whatever it's called now) in about a month.
Comments
I knew I had heard of Oranges are the Only fruit in a book context. Before it was a 1990 BBC serial it was a 1985 UK semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. Wikipedia describes it as being about a “sensitive teenage” lesbian rebelling against an Evangelical upbringing. The BBC did a newer version of it in 2016
Michelle K.B.
2024-10-13 01:00:13 +0000 UTCOh, please talk about VIP, it is such glorious madness! Speaking of glorious madness (and also early, somewhat problematic queer stuff), have you ever come across The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery? It’s a little mini-play from the 17th century, and basically it goes like this: the King of Sodom announces that being gay is legal. Most of the men in the kingdom immediately decide that they’re going to bang guys now, leaving the women to get it on with a) each other, b) the few men left who are still clinging to straightness, and c) animals. Then a guy shows up to announce that everyone in the kingdom has venereal disease now, and also the judgement of God will descend unless everyone repents. The king refuses to repent, fire falls from Heaven, end of play. Well, clearly this is not exactly what you might call positive representation. However, it’s interesting that the final voice we hear is not that of the moralising guy, but the entirely unrepentant king, still insisting on living an openly queer life even as the heavens fall. And it kind of has the same sort of deliberately transgressive, let’s-freak-out-the-normies-as-much-as-possible feel to it as the early films of John Waters, so there’s that. Plus there’s the fact that, at the time, it would have almost certainly been impossible to get it published if it just ended with happy queer people living their best lives. Now this play was never, so far as I know, performed on a stage, and almost certainly was never even intended to be. There was a bit of a thing back in the day (and to some extent even now) where people wrote plays that were intended to be read, not performed. And because you would read things in your private room, and your private room was at that time called your closet, this was called “closet drama”. So one of the very earliest openly queer narratives is also an example of closet drama. I do like these little historical ironies! By the way, a lot of people attribute The Farce of Sodom to John Wilmot. Personally, I don’t believe it for a moment. It’s not that I can’t imagine him writing it: I just don’t think he would have been capable of first publishing it anonymously, and then spending the entire rest of his life not saying or doing anything that would have absolutely confirmed him as the author. That feels like a level of discretion and self-control that would have been extremely out of character for him. Anyway, here it is on Amazon if you want to buy it (the links seem to be a lot shorter on the .com version than they are on .co.uk): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+farce+of+sodom&ref=nav_bb_sb
claire bee
2024-10-08 13:38:12 +0000 UTC
