Dreamways

Based on Ken Hanes’ Off-Broadway play, Fixing Frank revolves around the interactions of just three characters, three men. Young, freelance journalist Frank Johnston (portrayed by Andrew Elvis Miller) is in a long-term relationship with Jonathan Baldwin (Paul Provenza), an older psychologist. Jonathan works with former clients of psychologist Arthur Apsey (Dan Butler), who claims that he can "cure" gay men of their same-sex desires.

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What a complete surprise - of the pleasant variety – this movie turned out to be! This is a story about fights for love and glory on the NASCAR circuit, a venue that has not held much interest for me. However, each of the characters' stories turn out to be much more interesting than I’d imagined, playing against my own stereoptypes. The playing out of the various stories, as happens with dreams, is unexpected. And subversive.

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 William Meredith (1919 – 30 May 07)  Poet William Meredith has died at the age of 88. His name and poetry were unfamiliar to me until reading his obituary in The New York Times (01 Jun 07). It seems he was a past U.S. Poet laureate as well as a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Certain facts about his life caught my attention in the newspaper’s sizeable obituary.

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A Kiss too Far? For Same-Sex Couples, Simple Public Displays of Affection Are Fraught. Guy Trebay, The New York Times, 18 Feb 07, pg. IX, 1-2. "The spot was only 30 seconds, almost a blur amid the action at the Super Bowl. Yet the hubbub after a recent commercial showing two auto mechanics accidentally falling into lip-lock while eating the same Snickers bar went a long way toward showing how powerfully charged a public kiss between two men remains.

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This is a gay,  gothic, TV potboiler. A fellow in the 1800's is engaged to be married to, it turns out, a vampire-ette. When just before the wedding she catches him in the act of being fucked by the valet, she is consumed by jealousy and condemns him to eternal dungeondom. The only thing that will liberate him is the kiss of a beautiful young man. Fast forward to now, with the house of the basement an inn owned and run by gays. Of course, a young blond beauty boy finds chained vampire and kisses him. Waves of revenge then course throughout all the characters' lives.

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Starring Toby Jones, Daniel Craig, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Daniel, this movie is another telling of Truman Capote's story revolving around his book In Cold Blood. I had thought, after Phillip Seymour Hoffman's turn in Capote, that this second movie would be pointless. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this other revisioning of those people and events is quite interesting.

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Sleep Dream. I’m in an old-fashioned feeling space that looks a bit like Relatively Wilde Bookstore, but seems to be a barbershop. I am in an old-fashioned barber’s chair, the middle one in a row of 3. They set up near the north wall, close to the big display window that looks out onto the sidewalk. It is sunny and light. There are three or four burly gay fellows with me. One, ruddy blond and furry, in a sleeveless green plaid shirt is behind my chair. There is an elegantly bearded, short, dark-haired fellow in the chair to my right.

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This movie is about a Black, gay NY attorney who returns to his place of origin in Louisiana to investigate the death of a gay school friend. Another look at being black and gay, this time in the racist and homophobic South. The film is a bit uneven, so that I found myself not as connected to the characters as it seems I should have been. The culmination, where the attorney is strung up by blacks is a great metaphor for how ingorance and hatrred cause people to do the most abominable of things.  read more »

(Season 1, disc 2). The stories and acting in this TV show get better. The show tackles some interesting Black world issues: gays and Black churches; AIDS; gangsta life. It is a delight to view an all-Black world. Fidelity is an issue in all of the characters‘ lives. The circle of their friendship is a container in which that the four main characters continually find guidance and comfort.

This 1970’s German movie shows the story of Martin, an actor, is arrested in Switzerland for relations with a minor boy. He and the prison warden’s teenaged son, Thomas, fall in love. The boy winds up being institutionalized for his homosexuality, where he is brutalized and his spirit broken. Martin gets Thomas out of the Joint and tries to obtain papers for him to live in Deutschland. Thomas runs off with a rich fellow, a troll, as it were. He later tries to suicide, is rescued, and again institutionalized. The movie ends with his having fled the psych hospital.  read more »