FULL LENGTH GAY MOVIES SERIES
The series has camp, melodrama, Andy Warhol and the heart-attack-inducing fantasia of Jack Smith, whose “Flaming Creatures” is often the mountaintop of any series or festival that’s smart and bold enough to include this once-“indecent” avant-garde masterpiece. There’s also the mere fact that the German-Hungarian theater director Leontine Sagan had a little film career and that her “Mädchen in Uniform,” from 1931, about girls at a boarding school, is the film that most moved me. This gamut covers a lot of ground, too: the winking mannerism of Alfred Hitchcock (“Rope”), the dimensional experimentalism of Gregory Markopoulos (“Twice a Man,” with a young Olympia Dukakis), the serene classicism of Vincente Minnelli (“Tea and Sympathy”), the icebox psycho-expressionism of Ingmar Bergman (“Persona”). “Looking” went away last year, and the reason to bring it up now is that the Film Society of Lincoln Center is mounting a major weeklong film series about the bad old days called “An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall.” It’s an unapologetic, unmitigated, mesmerizingly diverse assembly of 23 feature-length movies and 25 shorts that constitutes a kaleidoscopic portrait of self-discovery and shame.
Here was often excellent television that wanted to recast gay life in a 21st-century light, in one of the world’s gayest cities.
But its alleged dullness - its normalcy - was a kind of achievement. And the ratings were obviously the reason the show was canceled. “Boring” was probably the reason that ratings weren’t great. Where was the sex? (The crazy sex.) Where were the social issues and politics? One guy works at a video-game company? Somebody else wants to open a restaurant? Snooze. Gay people complained - sighed, really: It’s so - boring. Before HBO canceled that show about the gay friends in San Francisco - it was called “Looking” - people complained.