October recommendations! Mysteries, musicals, and disaster-queers
Added 2023-10-11 16:00:08 +0000 UTCHello there!
Time once again for the monthly feedback video, a series that is free to everyone on Patreon and that started as a way for me to respond to questions ... and has now sort of morphed into trading recommendations for great stuff to watch.
So! If you like the kind of things that I make, here's stuff recommended by other folks like you, which you may also enjoy. Thanks to everyone who sent me recommendations, and please keep them coming!
Here's the things I talk about this month, and places to find them online:
- Male impersonators Hetty King and Vesta Tilley - there's a great writeup about them here
- The L-Shaped Room doesn't appear to be streaming legally, but someone uploaded the first bit to DailyMotion and there are DVDs floating around online
- 1935 drag film First a Girl is on YouTube
- two-season musical series Eli Stone is streaming on Amazon and Hulu and those kind of sites
- Viva Loughlin is harder to find but the pilot is on YouTube. I'm not quite recommending this, but it's an interesting artifact! Viva Blackpool is better and it's streaming free on Roku.
- Entertaining Mr. Sloane is available through BFI Player Classics and Something For Everyone is on YouTube is a surprisingly crisp transfer.
- Sitcom, the French film with lots of chaotic queerness, is also on BFI Player Classics. Come on, it was 1998! That's not old enough to be classic!
Comments
So…Lesley Gore! Incredible song writer and singer. Also a huge advocate for gay rights. Check out her story :)
Aleece Frost
2023-10-21 01:46:57 +0000 UTCOh my gosh how did I not know about the L Shaped Room...this is so my thing! For a fictionalised version of male impersonators in music hall, there is 'Tipping the Velvet', a series based on the Sarah Waters novel (a real ring of keys moment for me!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY8KTxRxMcQ
Gillian
2023-10-17 03:56:26 +0000 UTCthank you for so many interesting and beautiful videos! i enjoy them so so much! for recommendations that might also be of interest to others: (i'm not entirely sure if it fits) i think it's pretty well known already, but there's the instagram page 'the aids memorial' they post pictures and stories of people who died of aids. it's sad to read about all the people we've lost, but at the same time it's so so wonderful to see their stories being told i'm always so in love and in awe of the colorful, beautiful and artistic people to whom i'm being introduced to, through this page! they often remind me of people and stories you talk about! - 'what is remberbered lives'
Toni
2023-10-16 18:22:53 +0000 UTCI can't believe I forgot about this the first time British music hall was mentioned, but the 1985 Broadway musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood (based on the unfinished Dickens novel) uses a music hall/panto performance as a framing device for the story. The show's writer, Rupert Holmes (who also gave us "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" and the TV show Remember WENN), spent his childhood in England and based that part of the show on the pantos that he used to go to. The musical itself is unique because the ending is decided by audience vote, so each performance differs from the previous one. (Jean Stapleton also starred in the 1st national tour of Drood; what I would give for a bootleg of that.) Here's the original cast performing at the 1986 Tony Awards (with Betty Buckley as Edwin Drood): https://youtu.be/ufJYcNb9Lyk?si=R0udvc--G90ZDi4G
Jackie Schneider
2023-10-11 22:00:31 +0000 UTCOh that's so interesting -- I knew about Algie the Miner but I hadn't seen the earlier Pierrette film! It makes me very curious about the director Alice Guy & her circle. I know she was married & had kids but I wonder whose idea it was to have a feminine version of Pierrot story.
Matt Baume
2023-10-11 18:35:57 +0000 UTCOkay, didn't make it in this time around, but I will keep trying! However, I promise I will be less relentless this time around, I recognise that three comments in slighly over two weeks was pushing it a bit. Sorry! Got a bit over-excited. Anyway, for my next attempt: have you ever heard of Alice Guy-Blache? Amazing woman, very early film-maker, hugely advanced for her era. And she created two films which, I would argue, are strong contenders for the title of First Ever Gay Film. First there's Pierrette's Escapades (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XX6rMHPSoE). A girl is dancing in her room, a man comes in and tries to woo her. She rejects him, but accepts the next suitor who arrives; this one is, if you look closely at the body shape, female. They kiss; almost certainly the first lesbian kiss on film. But the first gay film? Well, maybe it's a bit too short, a bit lacking in actual narrative. In which case, let's move on to... Algie the Miner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCYYa0WxLXA&t=304s). Algie, a very camp man, wants (for whatever reason) to marry a girl. Her father says he can't unless he becomes less camp, so Algie goes off to a mining town in the generic West, where he does develop more of a butch presentation style, but also becomes very close to another man, Big Jim; so close, in fact, that Jim goes with Algie when he leaves to claim his girl/beard. There were other camp characters at around this time, but they weren't protagonists and they didn't tend to get happy endings. They certainly didn't end up with loyal, supportive male companions at the end of the story.
claire bee
2023-10-11 16:57:13 +0000 UTC
