Liars and Saints

This song maybe doesn't get its due. It's a bit complicated. Really, it's a monologue by a terrified victim of emotional and physical abuse. She would like to rise above her circumstances--but, as she informs us elsewhere, she doesn't really believe in herself. "Nobody ever treated me kindly...I'd meet a man, and I'd follow him blindly. He'd snap his fingers. Me? I'd say sure." Howard Ashman is famous for his "I Want" songs. "Somewhere That's Green" is the first great one. You can draw a straight line from that moment to the legendary "Part of Your World," in "Little Mermaid." (The humor in "Somewhere That's Green" comes from the modesty of Audrey's ambitions. She becomes rhapsodic over "a fence of real chain-link," "a washer and a dryer, and an ironing machine." The humor in "Part of Your World" comes from Ariel's linguistic difficulties: "St...

Five things to think about right now: (5) Jack Nicholson. Will he really make a return? It's rumored that he will do Lena Dunham's adaptation of "Toni Erdmann." He insists he does not have memory loss. I have sometimes wondered if his retreat from the spotlight also has to do with MeToo. Famously, he leered at Jennifer Lawrence in the middle of an Oscars interview. And didn't he once impregnate a young woman while still maintaining that he was officially committed to Anjelica Huston? Isn't it likely there are skeletons in Mr. Nicholson's closet? Maybe it's illegal or not-nice to type these things. And I could be wrong. (4) "The Problem with Apu." Mike Reiss, in his recent history of "The Simpsons," defended the creative decisions behind Apu. His argument is this: "The Simpsons" is a show that makes fun of everyone. In the many bizarre plots, the writers frequently make fun of themselves. They also make fun of gay peopl...

All night the rain fell on Arlington Park. The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud. In Arlington Park, people were sleeping. Here and there the houses showed an orange square of light. Cars crept along the deserted roads. A cat leapt from a wall, pouring itself down into the shadows. Silently the clouds filled the sky. The wind picked up. It faintly stirred the branches of the trees, and in the dark, empty park swings moved back and forth a little. A handful of dried leaves shuffled on th...

I’d rather not start with any backstory. I’m too busy for that right now: planning the escape, stealing my older brother’s fake ID (he’s lying about his height, by the way), and strategizing high-protein snacks for an overnight voyage to the single most dangerous city on earth. So no backstory, not yet. Just....fill in the pieces. For instance, if I neglect to tell you that I’m four foot eight, feel free to picture me a few inches taller. If I also neglect to tell you that all the other boys in my grade are five foot four, and that James Madison (his actual name) is five foot *nine* and doesn’t even have to mow the lawn for his allowance, you might as well just pretend I’m five foot nine too. Five foot nine with broad, slam-dunking hands and a girlfriend (in high school!) and a clear, unblemished face. Pretend I look like that, like James Madison. I do, except exactly opposite plus a little worse. By the way, despite our tremendous height gap, he and I weigh the same. The sch...

Everyone loves this theater. It is among my favorite spots in New York City--maybe second only to the Bronx Zoo. Returning to Film Forum today, on a breezy late-summer afternoon, in the heart of the greatest city of the world, I felt a bit sentimental. Film Forum was my boyfriend for several years. I exited a long, exhausting relationship with an actor who claimed to dislike movies. (An actor who disliked movies. See if you can figure that one out!) Suddenly overwhelmed with free time, I found myself going to Film Forum again and again and again. It is like the best kind of museum; the attention paid to movies, to old trailers, to old promotional posters ... feels scholarly. Unlike other museums, it allows you to sit down while you "consider the goods," and its subject is narrative art, the art of storytelling, which is maybe the only real art in my book. The movie I saw today was "Chinatown," and one of the many treats of my trip to Film Forum was seeing the or...

I can't stop thinking about "A Star Is Born." Why cast Lady Gaga? Her acting win for "American Horror Story," at the Golden Globes, was widely criticized. People feel she can't act. In the sort-of-ignored Gaga Netflix documentary, you see how uncomfortable Gaga is on the "Roanoke" set. So why have her return to drama? (In her Globes speech, Gaga did indicate that she wanted to be an actor before she wanted to be a singer, and this does seem to be a trend among artists. The misguided early longing. Lorrie Moore wanted to be a dancer. Joni Mitchell wanted to be a painter.) What if the main performer in this movie had been Cynthia Erivo--a musical theater powerhouse with charisma and an undeniable ability to get inside a character? You might sell fewer tickets, but might you find yourself making a better movie? It seems evident to me from the "Star Is Born" trailer that Gaga has not learned to act since "American Horror Story."...

The Comptons lived in the house next to the Blakes, and Mrs. Compton had never understood the importance of minding her own business. Louise Blake took her troubles to Mrs. Compton, Blake knew, and instead of discouraging her crying jags, Mrs. Compton had come to imagine herself a sort of confessor and had developed a lively curiosity about the Blakes’ intimate affairs. She had probably been given an account of their most recent quarrel. Blake had come home one night, overworked and tired, and had found that Louise had done nothing about getting supper. He had gone into the kitchen, followed by Louise, and had pointed out to her that the date was the fifth. He had drawn a circle around the date on the kitchen calendar. “One week is the twelfth,” he had said. “Two weeks will be the nineteenth.” He drew a circle around the nineteenth. “I’m not going to speak to you for two weeks,” he had said. “That will be the nineteenth.” She had wept, she had protested, bu...

I'm watching two HBO shows right now--"Insecure" and "Sharp Objects"--and I can't help but notice how much more brilliant and vital "Insecure" is. Not that there is a competition. And of course "Sharp Objects" gives us the great gift that is Amy Adams. But still. Some thoughts. - Language. Is there a writer on TV who loves words as much as Issa Rae loves words? It doesn't matter what the plot is; you just become giddy because of the use of English. "I see you," "I've been saving, I've been saving, I've been saving," "It was a nebulous fuck," "Party Lyft," "We Got Y'All," "I didn't do *shit* to your vase," "ho-tation," "Are you thirsty? For a drink?" -- This is the work of a poet. Issa Rae makes me think of Alison Bechdel. When Bechdel was getting started on "Dykes to Watch Out For," she said her aim was to introduce the worl...

A few notes about the trailer for "Eighth Grade." -The "plot" of this preview is slightly deceptive. It presents one of Kayla's YouTube clips as a kind of triumphant reflection on experience--something hard-earned. But that's not what the YouTube clips are. They are delusional statements; they are Kayla play-acting. She hasn't earned the authority she attempts to convey in those clips, which is why they seem (endearingly) hollow and vague. Even though they are failures, we're also meant to love them, because they're the sign of a character fighting to "break the mold," to do something unusual (and even artistic). They are also maybe a self-portrait by Bo Burnham; Burnham himself made YouTube clips when he was in school, and he was even told by one dick-ish Catholic-school official that he ought to stop. ("Stop pursuing my dream? Will do!") -One of many things I love about "Eighth Grade" is that it identifies an u...

I have spent a good part of my summer attempting to catalogue all substantial cultural and pop-cultural contributions by gay men who interest me. Some choices have been obvious: Kander and Ebb, John Cheever. But I'm especially happy when I can record, for posterity, thoughts on the works of the very, very obscure. And that's today. Specifically, that's Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen. One thing I notice within a certain subset of gay writers: Actual life can be so awkward and painful, the artist retreats to a dream world of stories, a hodgepodge of references to Disney World and Glenn Close. Perhaps he starts a blog--and in that blog, instead of describing his professional ambitions or his reaction to World Events, he writes a great deal about, say, Rip Torn in "Hercules," or the cast recordings of Darius de Haas, or the songwriting corpus of Taylor Swift. That's a sign that you're dealing with a gay man. I see this trend in the works of Drew Droege. Who ...

My best friend, Tracy Wu, says I’m really tough on people. She says she wonders sometimes how I can like her. But we both know that’s a big joke. Tracy’s the best friend I’ll ever have. I just wish we were in the same fifth-grade class. My teacher is Mrs. Minish. I’m not crazy about her. She hardly ever opens the windows in our room because she’s afraid of getting a stiff neck. I never heard anything so dumb. Somedays our room gets hot and stuffy and it smells--like this afternoon. We’d been listening to individual reports on The Mammal for almost an hour. Donna Davidson was standing at the front of the room reading hers. It was on the horse. Donna has this *thing* about horses. I tried hard not to fall asleep but it wasn’t easy. For a while I watched Michael and Irwin as they passed a *National Geographic* back and forth. It was open to a page full of naked people. Wendy and Caroline played Tic Tac Toe behind Wendy’s notebook. Wendy won three games in a row. I wasn’t surprised. We...

Malik did not move beyond the street and he liked how gradually he was becoming known as he made his way to the supermarket to buy milk or soft drinks or tea. He enjoyed being greeted and saluted. And there were other things too that made him feel comfortable. Even though eight of them shared the room, for example, he learned that he would not need to lock his suitcase, he was assured that no one would touch it. One night, when one of the other lodgers wanted to move his suitcase for a moment, he came and asked permission. He realized that they all kept money and photographs and other private things in their cases, fully confident that no one would go near them.  He noticed too that each of them had something special, a camera, a Walkman, a mobile phone, a DVD player, that set them apart and that they lent out as a special favour, or at particular times. Only Mahmood owned nothing. Mahmood worked hard and spent no money because he wanted desperately to go home. Some of the others...

It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt the season's mockery--such inexplicable desolation, such sludge in the heart. She could almost burst--could one burst with joylessness? What she was feeling was too strange, too contrary, too isolated for a mere emotion. It had to be a premonition--one of being finally whisked away after much boring flailing and flapping and the pained, purposeless work that constituted life. And in spring, no less: A premonition of death. A rehearsal. A secretary's call to remind of the appointment. Of course, it had always been in the spring that she'd discovered her husband's affairs. But the last one was years ago, and what did she care about all that now; there had been a parade of flings. In the end, they'd made her laugh:  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha !  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!...

To begin at the beginning, the airplane from Minneapolis in which Francis Weed was traveling East ran into heavy weather. The sky had been a hazy blue, with the clouds below the plane lying so close together that nothing could be seen of the earth. Then mist began to form outside the windows, and they flew into a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires. The color of the cloud darkened to gray, and the plane began to rock. Francis had been in heavy weather before, but he had never been shaken up so much. The man in the seat beside him pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a drink. Francis smiled at his neighbor, but the man looked away; he wasn’t sharing his painkiller with anyone. The plane had begun to drop and flounder wildly. A child was crying. The air in the cabin was overheated and stale, and Francis’s left foot went to sleep. He read a little from a paper book that he had bought at the airport, but the violence of the storm divided his attent...

Eighth grade: My public middle school had a pool, and that pool doubled as a nuclear fall-out shelter. Maybe that sign was just a relic from a more troubled era? In any case, the sign remained. On days when you had mandatory swim class, you had to strip down in front of your peers, which was its own special trauma. Then you would shiver in a long line, and eventually, your turn would come, and you would race against classmates. Lengths, lengths of the pool. When you were inevitably last, by a wide a margin, your failure would be on display; it would be something visible to all. “My brother met this girl,” said my classmate, K, as we waited for our relay turn, “and she said she gives blow jobs.” She gives blow jobs-- like cool drinks at a lemonade stand! K’s brother had arranged to meet the girl after school-- this week! --to obtain his blow job. I didn’t really know what a blow job was, but the story seemed unbearably exciting, and then of course there wasn’t anything like follow-u...

Young gay reader! Know that there was a non-Sondheim gay titan of the late-twentieth-century musical theater, and he was Fred Ebb. He seemed to be part of a "thrupple" ... He was buried with two male "friends" in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. His writing partner--John Kander--was also gay. Kander married his boyfriend late in life. Who are the gay male writing forces in Broadway musical history? Sondheim, Howard Ashman, Kander and Ebb, Cole Porter, Michael John LaChiusa, Benj Pasek, Jerry Herman, William Finn, Lorenz Hart, Michael Bennett, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Tony Kushner, Jerome Robbins. I'm sure I'm forgetting many. One thing I love about Kander and Ebb, and a thing that strikes me as "gay," is an obsession with death, and particularly grisly death. You see this over and over in the (gay) work of, e.g. Truman Capote, David Sedaris, Ryan Murphy, Peter Cameron, Howard Ashman, Sondheim, and of course Bryan Fuller ("H...

(3) "Three Identical Strangers." Everyone loves this, so it's not news to say it's one of the best movies of the summer. What may count as news: This movie has *craft* ...You might not notice it the first time you watch. The two surviving brothers are splendid narrators. They are relaxed, and they know they have a good story to tell; there's something splendidly *unforced* about their narration. So many details linger, and linger, in your memory: The moment Madonna recruits the three for a cameo in "Desperately Seeking Susan," the moment the cop pulls over one speeding brother and learns of the I-have-a-secret-twin discovery, the shadowy cabal drinking champagne in secret in Manhattan, the way the neighbor asks for family permission before confirming that the unwell brother has shot himself...Unforgettable. You don't have a story without a transgression. A plot takes shape when one character has a covert manipulative interest in another character...

Close's next movie, "The Wife," comes out this Friday. There is Oscar buzz. When that happens so early in the season, I worry. Once upon a time, everyone seemed really, really certain that Sally Hawkins would win the Oscar for "The Shape of Water." -Ms. Close is the living person most-nominated for Oscars who has never actually won the Oscar. She does share this record with (dead) Deborah Kerr, who was so enchanting in "Bonjour Tristesse." If Close doesn't win for "The Wife," she will charge ahead with her film adaptation of ALW's adaptation of "Sunset Boulevard," and this, to me, seems to be a good strategy. As Ms. Close has observed, she has been in "this business" for over 40 years. The lady is tough; she has stamina. I want her to campaign, campaign, campaign. -Everything Ms. Close says is brilliant and scintillating, all the time. In a recent issue of "People," she was effortlessly captivating. S...

You don't know Mr. Dolan's work, and yet you do. He's the young gay man responsible for Adele's "Hello" video. He has also made a few well-loved indie movies, including the semi-autobiographical "I Killed My Mother," which involves two young men painting the walls of a house, then having lively sex. (You can find that scene on Youtube!) (Gays and their mothers! Dolan may be familiar with gay icon Colm Toibin, whose semi-recent book of essays was entitled, "New Ways to Kill Your Mother.") Anyway, I haven't seen any of Dolan's movies, but all I need is five minutes with the "Hello" video to be certain of Dolan's semi-campy genius. Why doesn't Adele work with Dolan all the time? She seems to think that she is not the "visual icon" that--e.g.--Beyonce is. But I don't agree. I want more Adele/Dolan collaborations. More is more, and Dolan piles on the melodrama. I especially like the number of...

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce. That happened in 1930, when Sarah was nine years old and Emily five. Their mother, who encouraged both girls to call her “Pookie,” took them out of New York to a rented house in Tenafly, New Jersey, where she thought the schools would be better and where she hoped to launch a career in suburban real estate. It didn’t work out--very few of her plans for independence ever did--and they left Tenafly after two years, but it was a memorable time for the girls. “Doesn’t your father ever come home?” other children would ask, and Sarah would always take the lead in explaining what a divorce was. “Do you ever get to see him?” “Sure we do.” “Where does he live?” “In New York City.” “What does he do?” “He writes headlines. He writes the headlines in the New York Sun.” And the way she said it made clear that they ought to...