Enter MIX Festival, New York City's annual queer experimental film festival extravaganza. Now in its 28th incarnation, MIX transformed a raw warehouse space into a 24/7 art and film hub from November 10 to 15, comprising thousands of square feet of installations (including a massive yarn-and-fabric work by Diego Montoya), screening spaces, artists, and activists. Every year, the event is spearheaded by the people it represents, meaning "queer" is standard and "experimental" is always to be expected.
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Originally published on Vice. Read the original here.
Talking with Director Todd Haynes about 'Carol,' Lesbian Love, and the Impossibility of Indie Films
There have been unbelievable legislative triumphs that are essential and correct and humane, but there's been all kinds of losses along the way. Really, I think what it's about is capitalism has won, and there's not even a language for standing outside the market and being critical of the market and seeing it as something one can stand outside of and speak coherently about from the margins.
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Meet Basil Twist, the 'Genius' Puppet Master Bringing the Inanimate to Life
Like science fiction, puppetry is an art form where the better you are at it, the more people try to call it something else. Puppets, in America, are for children, and children are like small, gullible sociopaths—hardly the folks you'd look to for artistic recommendations. Which begs the question: Why give a "genius" fellowship to someone working in a discipline we barely even recognize as art?
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How to Write a Young Adult Novel About a Gay Kid Without It Being a 'Gay Book'
Husky follows the story of Davis, a pre-gay middle-school boy preparing to enter his freshman year. In an unusual twist for a YA novel these days, Davis's sexuality is less ambiguous and not fully formed. He knows he's different, but he doesn't quite know yet that it has to do with sexuality. Or as Kirkus Reviews put it, "This is not at its heart a book about sexuality but about humanity."
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'These Schmucks Were Geniuses!': Poet Eileen Myles Remembers Her New York
In her poetry and poetic prose, Eileen Myles has explored the queer, the strange, and the mundane in the East Village for 40 years. Her writing, which includes over 20 volumes of poems, plays, and nonfiction works, is rooted in the many identities she embodies: her femininity and her androgynous queerness; her working-class upbringing; her upbringing in Boston.
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'Closet Monster' Is a Gay Coming-of-Age Tale with a Canadian Sense of Humor
Canadian director Stephen Dunn's feature-length debut, the gay coming-of-age storyCloset Monster, offers a light touch on decidedly heavy topics, including family violence, divorce, gay bashing, and coming out. It's a very Canadian film—with a dry sense of humor that crops up at unexpected moments, Closet Monster manages to be quiet without being somber, serious without ever crossing into melodrama.
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Three's A Crowd?: Finding the Language to Describe My Three-Person Relationship
"Thruple" is a hideous neologism that sounds like wet paper being torn. "Threeway" and "threesome" are great if you're writing copy for a porn site, but not if you're trying to have a polite conversation with your boyfriend's Sunday-school-teacher Southern mother. "Love triangle" comes with too much baggage, while "triad" calls to mind gangsters in Southeast Asia. "Tribunal" is too judicial, "troika" too communist, and "triumvirate" is just too damn long.
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How to Have Gay Sex Without Being Gay
Jane Ward's new book, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, is an investigation into "no homo" culture, which charts the many ways in which straight white men explore, explain, and excuse their sexual behavior with other men. So readily visible are the pieces of evidence she amasses, and so surprising are her conclusions, that reading Not Gay is like doing a Magic Eye puzzle for the mind: All the dots you'd never before put together suddenly snap into place, allowing you to see just how hot for other men some straight men are.
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