Paul Monette: the Brink of Summer's End (1996)

This biographic documentary is a tribute to Paul Monette, the gifted gay writer whose death in 1995 brought an early end to a promising career. The film examines his childhood in Massachusetts, his close family life, his school experiences, and his struggle with his sexuality. Readings from Monette's work punctuate interviews with the author, his brother, and friends. Home movies and photos reveal Monette's love of life nearly as well as his words. "Becoming A Man", "Borrowed Time", and "Last Watch of the Night" are masterpieces of gay literature that uplifted a generation of men who were imprisoned in the closet, and inspire another generation who can now be proud of themselves and those they love. Paul Monette left more than a legacy of words about the experience of living with and dying from AIDS. He left all of us with the strategy to "go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world."

Originally planning to make a documentary that profiled several gay people, director Monte Bramer and producer Lesli Klainberg changed their minds after meeting Monette. "It was a magical three hours," Bramer said of this initial meeting. "We knew then that here was a subject of a major documentary." The film was a big hit at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, picking up the coveted Audience Award for Best Documentary. Jon Ehrlich composed the incidental music and Monte Bramer wrote the script and directed.

La Virgen de los sicarios (2000)

Fernando (Germán Jaramillo) is an author in his fifties who has returned to his crime-ridden drug capital hometown of Medellin, Colombia. He meets Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), a handsome gay 16-year-old assassin at a party and immediately falls for him. The two begin a relationship consisting of sex and Fernando telling Alexis how pastoral the city was when he left. Alexis explains about robbery, violence, and shootings. Even though Fernando has come home to die, his negative worldview is mellowed by Alexis. He soon discovers that Alexis is a gang member and sicario (hitman), and members of other gangs are after him. Several assassination attempts fail, but he is finally killed by two boys on a motorcycle. Fernando is partly responsible for this, because Alexis' weapon had been lost before the murder due to Fernando's suicidal impulses. Fernando visits Alexis' mother (Cenobia Cano) and gives her some money, and then walks through the streets aimlessly where he meets Wilmar (Juan David Restrepo), who bears a striking resemblance to Alexis. He and Wilmar begin an affair, the kind of relationship he had with Alexis. Wilmar is also a killer, but it is a shocking revelation to Fernando when he finds out that Wilmar is the one who shot Alexis. He vows to kill Wilmar, but then learns it was Alexis who started the violence by killing Wilmar's brother. When Wilmar goes to say goodbye to his mother before he and Fernando leave the country, he is killed as well. Realizing that the vicious cycle of murders in Medellín denies happiness, Fernando presumably commits suicide, but the last scene is ambiguous.

According to the director, the relationship between Fernando and Alexis is patterned on Greek pederasty, where "not only was a boy learning from an adult, but an adult was also learning from the boy. It's a two-way relationship, especially in this movie, where the writer discovers things about the new realities of his town that he would never know otherwise. And obviously, the boy has everything to discover from this adult." The film was shot with high-definition digital video cameras, giving the movie a cinéma vérité look. Fernando Vallejo wrote the screenplay from his novel. Barbet Schroeder directed. The English title for this Columbian/French movie is "Our Lady of the Assassins".

Boca a Boca (1995)

Aspiring actor Víctor Ventura (Javier Bardem) for financial reasons works for a phone-sex company, thrilling the men and women of Madrid with his repertoire of exciting sex conversations. Auditioning for acting roles is more humiliating than being paid to talk dirty to strangers, and the phone job is actually a more interesting professional challenge. The film mixes soft-core seduction with pratfalls. For example, there is a zipper mishap to interrupt a strained heavy-breathing episode. Events escalate once Victor, who took the phone sex job without expecting to meet Ms. Right, finds himself falling for Amanda (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who is one of his clients. She says that her husband Bill Ricardo (Josep Maria Flotas), a homosexual who is one of his best clients, has also had phone-sex with Victor, which leads to more complications.

One of the film's funny scenes has Victor being told by his agent Angela (Maria Barranco) that he looks too American to land a role in a big American movie. To compensate for this, he turns up with open shirt and slicked-back hair, smoldering dramatically as he kisses the hand of an American talent agent. Victor encounters a bratty American filmmaker whose combination of ignorance and arrogance makes him an easy target. Later Victor launches into a raging diatribe in a restaurant when the guy orders Coca-Cola, and ends up impressing everyone with a show of his acting talent. The film adds transvestite waiters to this scene, sets some of its action in a phone sex disco and lets Amanda appear in blond, red and dark wigs at different times. Most of the characters are play-acting, which gives the movie a chance to satirize show business and artificiality. Although the comic possibilities of phone sex have been exhausted, this farce gives this worn out topic a go. Written by Juan Luis Iborra and Manuel Gómez Pereira, who also directed. The English title is "Mouth to Mouth".

Victim (1961)

Until 1967 homosexual acts between consenting adults were illegal in Britain. In the USA this film was banned, and it played an influential role in liberalizing laws regarding homosexuality. Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery) is found hanging dead in his jail cell. He was incarcerated for allegedly embezzling money from his company, which he admitted to the police. However, the truth is he took the money because he was being blackmailed for being a homosexual. After the suicide, Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde), a married lawyer, with the help of Barrett's gay friend Eddy Stone (Donald Churchill), tries to find others who are being blackmailed. Is Farr doing this to pay the blackmailers money in return for the incriminating evidence against him (innocent photographs of Farr and Barrett) or does he want to stop the blackmailers from targeting other homosexuals? The educated police Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) considers the sodomy laws nothing more than an aid to blackmailers and helps Farr. The blackmailers vandalize Farr's property, writing "Queer" on his garage doors in an attempt to intimidate him. But Farr helps the police catch them and promises to give evidence in court, even if it means destroying his career. At the end of the film, Farr talks to his wife Laura (Sylvia Syms) and burns the picture that originally incriminated him.

"Victim" was the first English language film in history to use the word "homosexual". It is the first mainstream film to portray sympathetically and realistically homosexual society, at a time when homosexuality was still a crime, when to be gay was a matter of secrecy and shame. Janet Green and John McCormick wrote the screenplay. Philip Green composed the music and Basil Dearden directed.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

In this film a gay black con artist cunningly maneuvers his way into the lives of a white, upper-class NYC family. Flan (Donald Sutherland) and Louisa "Ouisa" Kittredge (Stockard Channing) are rich art dealers. One night they are called on by a wounded young man Paul (Will Smith), who claims to be a friend of their son and daughter from Harvard. Paul says he was mugged in Central Park and is the son of Sidney Poitier. Over the evening Paul flatters the couple and a business guest they are hosting with his tall tales and fascinating life stories. He claims that his famous father is casting a film version of "Cats" and offers his hosts roles as extras in the film. They offer him a bed for the night, and he enchants them with a home-cooked meal and eloquent conversation. The next morning, they find that Paul is not who he claims to be. When they investigate the life of Paul, they find the hidden truth. Their investigations are intriguing and lead them to re-evaluate their lives. The plot is notable for the disparity it reveals between the wealthy and the have-nots yearning to be rich. It is interesting that it is the gay member of the cast who serves as the crossover person. The end concludes on a comic rather than tragic note.

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is an average of six steps away from each person on Earth. Sutherland, Channing, and Smith deliver excellent performances in a great movie. John Guare wrote the screenplay from his hit Broadway stage play. Fred Schelpisi directed.

Crocodile Tears (1998)

This movie is a modern "Faust" about bitter gay art teacher Simon Desoto (Ted Sod) who learns he is HIV-positive. He speaks the first lines, "There's this friend of mine. He's HIV-positive. Its not me. Don't even begin to think I'm talking about me." Because he had a friend who suffered from AIDS before choosing to commit suicide, Simon panics and writes to the devil for help. Evil Mr. Cheseboro (William Salyers) offers the gift of health if Simon will become a straight stand-up comic who specializes in racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and homophobic humour. Plus Simon's former lover Carl (Dan Savage) must die instead. Satan is a redneck junior high school principal who plays the accordion, and Simon agrees to the deal and becomes a huge success in show biz, with the audiences laughing hard at his offensive jokes. The simple plot with a twist continues in an outrageous, heavy-handed, but uninteresting way. It doesn't fit together very well, and the film is disappointing. "Crocodile Tears" is an original version of the "Faust" legend, and the acting, sets, and production values are OK for a low-budget independent movie. Ann Coppel directed this dark comedy, adapted by executive producer and actor Ted Sod from his own AIDS-themed play "Satan and Simon DeSoto".

Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story (1996)

This film is about is about the tough times Greg Louganis (Mario López) had on his way to becoming one of the world's top Olympic divers. Gregory ("Greg") Efthimios Louganis is an American diver, who is best known for winning back-to-back Olympic titles in both the 3 m. and 10 m. diving events. He received the James E. Sullivan Award in 1984 as the top amateur athlete in the United States. Louganis is of Samoan/Swedish descent and was raised in California by his adoptive parents, a Greek-American couple. At age 16, he took part in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, where he placed second in the tower event. Two years later, he won his first world title in the same event. He was a favorite for two golds in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, but an American boycott of the games prevented him from participating. Louganis won two world titles in 1982, and in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, with record scores and leads over his opponents, he won gold medals in both the springboard and tower diving events. After winning two more world championship titles in 1986, he repeated his 1984 feat in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, although not without difficulties. In what is considered one of the greatest feats in sporting history, Louganis suffered an injury, hitting his head on the diving board during the preliminary rounds while performing a reverse 2 1/2 pike. He completed the preliminaries, despite a concussion, then went on to repeat the dive during the finals, with nearly perfect scores, earning him the gold medal. His incredible comeback earned him the title of ABC's Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year for 1988.

Louganis posed nude for Playgirl magazine in 1987. In 1994 Louganis announced he was gay and took part in the 1994 Gay Games as diving announcer. He also performed an exhibition of several dives to a standing-room only crowd of nearly 3,000 spectators. Following the announcement of his HIV status, Louganis was dropped by most of his corporate sponsors, with the exception of the aquatics gear manufacturer Speedo, which continues to sponsor him as of 2007. Based on the superior book by Greg Louganis and Eric Marcus, this made for TV movie is a very good profile of an impressive star athlete. Steven Hilliard Stern directed.

Staircase (1969)

Charles Dyer (Rex Harrison) and Harry Leeds (Richard Burton) are a middle-aged gay couple that have been living together for nearly 20 years. Both earn a living as barbers in the West End of London and both care deeply for their mothers, but not each other as time apart takes its toll on their relationship when Harry has to care for his invalid mother who constantly snaps at him. Harry is round, fearful, fussy, and possesses a terrible secret. His head underneath the fake surgical bandages is bald. Charlie, in his fifties and still handsome, is a waspish queen who favors tight pants and a little make-up around the eyes."It's permitted now, you know, Harry. It's permitted," says Charlie, who says everything twice. That is just one of the things that drives Harry nearly crazy. Harry and Charlie are exploited as gay freaks, because Burton and Harrison are interesting actors whose styles command attention even when the material does not. "Staircase" is essentially a stunt movie, full of substitutes: false teeth, false hair, and feminine pronouns for masculine.

What story line there is concerns the increasing tension between Harry and Charlie as the latter prepares to answer a summons for having appeared at the Adam's Apple nightclub in drag, or, as the summons put it: "in a manner calculated to bring depravity." Harry reassures Charlie that everything will be all right, and Charlie, in turn, can't resist heaping insults on Harry, whom he describes as flabby, wrinkled, paunchy, freckled, sagging, bloated and veined, among other things. But so is everyone in the film, from the male hustler Charlie brings home one night to Harry's arthritic old mum (Cathleen Nesbitt), who lives with Harry and Charlie. The movie, like Charlie, says everything at least twice, and Charlie's mum is no better, a 90-year-old lady whose mind is turning to pudding in an old people's home, but who comes to her senses long enough to scream "Sodomite!" when Charlie comes to visit. The two stars seem uncomfortable, perhaps to call attention to the real distance that exists between the actors and their roles.

The film is adapted from Charles Dyer's 1966 two-character play with the action taking place over the course of one night as they discuss their loving but often volatile past together and possible future without each other. Dyer adapted his play for the movie and opened up the script to show the couple's neighborhood, expanded the action to cover a period of ten days, and added characters. The music score was composed by Dudley Moore. Stanley Donen directed.

As Good as It Gets (1997)

Set in NYC, Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), is a cranky, bigoted, misanthropic writer who has his life turned upside down when neighboring gay artist Simon Bishop (Greg Kinnear) is brutally beaten and hospitalized. His dog Verdell is entrusted to Melvin. He insists on sitting at the same table at the same restaurant each day. Carol (Helen Hunt), the only waitress who will tolerate him, must leave work to care for her sick son, making it impossible for Melvin to eat breakfast. Because his obsessive-compulsive disorder requires a structured routine for him to maintain his sanity, Melvin arranges for a doctor to help her son at no charge. She shows up at his doorstep in the rain and tells Melvin she will never have sex with him. Melvin and Carol drive Simon to his parents in Baltimore to obtain money. They return to Manhattan, and Simon learns that Melvin has taken him in because Simon's apartment has been sublet, allowing Simon an opportunity to get back on his feet. Carol and Melvin resume their attempts at a relationship, with Carol resignedly telling Melvin it won't work because, "All you do is make me feel bad about myself." In unfamiliar territory, Melvin struggles to compliment Carol. He goes on to say that she represents everything that is good and right in the world, the balance he needs to deal with his disorder, and life in general. They kiss. The movie ends with Carol and Melvin walking into a bakery early in the morning, and Melvin no longer compulsively avoids sidewalk cracks.

Jack Nicholson won a Best Actor Oscar, and Helen Hunt won a Best Actress Oscar for their performances in this witty romantic comedy. Enough said? Mark Andrus wrote the screenplay from his own story. James L. Brooks directed.

Outrageous! (1977)

Gay Toronto hairdresser Robin Turner (Craig Russel) is a very talented female impersonator who does an act in local gay clubs. His roommate is Liza Connors (Hollis McLaren), a high-school friend who is now pregnant and recently released from a mental hospital where she was being treated for schizophrenia. She is determined never to return to the hospital again, and he wants to be a show-business success with his impressions. When Robin loses his job, the two try their luck in NYC at the "Jackrabbit Club". His perfect impressions of Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Carol Channing, Tallulah Bankhead, and Mae West make a splash. But as Robin's star rises, Liza spirals into misery and madness. Robin and Liza need each other, and this can be explained by their total acceptance of one another. They both have to take chances in life, but as Robin says, people treat, “life as though it’s a can of Coke, and they’re afraid to drink it too fast.” Hunky gay cab driver Bob (David McIlwraith) meets them, and as a former talent agent agrees to represent Robin and gets him a job at "Ziggy's Cabaret", where he becomes their sensational star attraction. Liza goes to the hospital to give birth, but the baby is stillborn. She goes into a deep depression, believeing she is "the one born dead." Robin replies "You're not dead. You're alive and sick and living in New York like eight million other people." He tells Liza that yes, she's crazy, but she has to make that crazy work for her. "You’ll never be normal," he says, "but you’re special.” The film ends with Robin and a recovering Liza dancing madly together.

This show-business cult comedy with a twist is a great, touching, and sincere 1970's period peice with charming performances by all. It's a gay classic with sad and campy fun moments. Craig Russel's many impersonations are the best in cincema history. He worked as the private secretary to Mae West, so he could impersonate her perfectly. Richard Benner directed from his own script based on Margaret Gibson Gilboord's short story.

"Too Outrageous" (1987) is the somewhat disappointing sequel to "Outrageous!". It is a better production, with a bigger budget, better cast, and Craig Russell has a very attractive boyfriend. Robin Turner, the hairdresser-turned-female impersonator who began his nightclub routine in the earlier film, is still playing in small clubs, and his devoted friend Liza Connors (Hollis McLaren) hasn't yet fulfilled her dream of becoming a successful writer. The film tells what happens after Robin is discovered by a pair of agents who are intent on making him a big star. The agents, particularly a woman named Betty (Lynne Cormack), gush about what great potential Robin has, and dream of revamping his act so antiseptically that they can bill him as ''Canada's Comic Illusionist", instead of the specialty performer that he really is. Robin gets even when he appears on a live talk show and lets the world know that its host is gay. They deal with AIDS in this one, but it seems out of place with the rest of the movie. Russell works best when left to his own devices. He's better off wisecracking and performing than he is anguishing over his professional future. The film also features a female impersonator named Jimmy James, who looks uncannily like Marilyn Monroe, and Robin exclaims "He's good!". Once again Richard Benner wrote the script and directed.