Kyle Turner

<h1>NEW YORK — For many LGBTQ people, June signals rainbows and glitter, but also reflection. With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and the WorldPride festival colliding in New York this Pride Month, it’s an especially momentous time to look to the past to consider what Pride means today, and cinema — long an integral part of queer artistic expression — can be an important tool. Many of the city’s repertory movie theaters have assembled special programs for the occasion, from revivals of “Paris Is Burning” (Film Forum) and “The Queen” (IFC Center) to a series looking at queer cinema before and after Stonewall (Museum of the Moving Image).</h1>

As ideas about queerness have expanded, so has our engagement with media that reflect those experiences. Nick McCarthy, director of programming and operations at NewFest, stressed the value of regular programming and its potential to create community. “It’s equally important that the contemporary stories told through queer cinema continue to mirror not just the progress but the evolution of our community,” he said. While NewFest is best known for its annual film festival, it produces year-round programming, which McCarthy said is “essential to serving the community in order to see themselves reflected on screen.”

One such program is OutCinema, a three-day event presented in part with NYC Pride. McCarthy also hosts a monthly screening and talkback series at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, as well as a monthly retrospective series at the Quad called Coming Out Again (which will be screening “Gay USA” on June 26).

One of the challenges in creating this programming is the looming threat of streaming services, where a seemingly endless amount of content is always available. The Metrograph is countering that with Films of Pride and Protest, a program of shorts not easily found on digital services. And Adam Baran, who programs the Queer/Art/Film series with movie director Ira Sachs, said that he suggests alternative titles if a proposed selection is either too present on streaming, or screens in New York too often.

Niche streaming services like Dekkoo offer a home for gay movies, but, as Michael Koresky, editorial director at Film at Lincoln Center, noted, the quality of their output is inconsistent. “There’s a lot of product out there, made cheaply, and, not unlike porn, it’s churned out to appeal to a hungry demographic,” he said.

The major streaming services create an illusion of access and community sans shared physical space; the LGBT movie sections on Netflix and Hulu might have a handful of gems, but their selection is limited, even as they debut original programming. The alternative streaming platforms for gay cinema have yet to break out, and Baran remarked in a phone interview on the challenges of the market. “It’s very hard to know what a gay audience wants, especially a gay audience willing to spend money,” he said.

So how important is it for gay audiences to be able to gather together — in person — to view these films? Will gay audiences spend money on these specialty repertory programs, like the German-focused Queer Kino at the Quad or the tongue-in-cheek presentation of “The Babadook,” whose horror villain was memed into a gay icon across social media in 2017, at IFC Center? Will they be drawn to Koresky’s salon-like panel “Queer &amp; Now &amp; Then” to catalyze them to consider past, present and futures of queerness and cinema?

“It needs to be encouraged in our community to actively have these dialogues in person to strengthen the fabric, identity, and impact of our community’s ethos,” McCarthy noted.

In addition to providing tangible community, programmers — with goals both political and artistic — hope to give audiences new ways to look at queer subjects.

“The programming doesn’t only show films by trans filmmakers, or only films about trans subjects or the experiences of trans characters, but tries to imagine what a trans lens can bring to films that more loosely explore trans-adjacent themes,” said D’Angelo Madsen Minax, who works with Joey Carducci on a series at Anthology Film Archives called The Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film, of their mission.

Carducci added, “I think it’s crucially important to make space for this kind of work, now and always.”

Stonewall 50 and WorldPride provide great reasons to honor queer legacies, but they’re hardly the end point for keeping queer stories alive, according to Baran, whose series continues this month with a screening of “Death Becomes Her” presented by the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. In thinking about queer cultural history, he said, “We’re all on a continuum, and we need to understand it, and the only way we can understand it is to seek it out.”

And Thomas Beard, a programmer at large for Film at Lincoln Center who organized its 2016 series Queer Cinema Before Stonewall, cautioned against an emphasis on commemorating milestone moments.

“There are obviously many crucial episodes in the history of gay and trans liberation that predate Stonewall,” he said. “Our relationship to the historical past is never as neat as anniversary celebrations like these might suggest.”

“The horizon of true liberation still feels quite distant, though we still are struggling toward it,” he added.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/movies/stonewall-50-worldpride-lgbtq-movies.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

As ideas about queerness have expanded, so has our engagement with media that reflect those experiences.

Queer cinema seen as bridge to future

Before receiving a cancer diagnosis, Michael spent the bulk of his time with his best friend, Andy (Ray Romano), doing puzzles, playing a squash-like game called “Paddleton,” and watching the same kung fu movie repeatedly. The diagnosis changes nothing and everything about their routine. The two men, who seem to have only each other, bristle at having to engage in small talk with anyone. And yet “Paddleton” is an aggressively gentle film.

Well, for a film about assisted suicide.

“Paddleton,” a Netflix original film, spends most of its time chronicling the aftermath of Michael’s diagnosis and his subsequent decision to end his life with Andy’s help. Alex Lehmann, who directed the movie, and Duplass, who wrote it with him, make a commendable effort in observing its characters’ tics in hyper-specific detail. So do Romano and Duplass, who as actors are clearly invested in trying to imbue this intimate friendship with a lived-in familiarity and mumbly warmth.

The pace is leisurely, the humor likable (until it proves a liability), and its two lead characters are illustrated with generous precision.

And yet for all that, the payoffs feel negligible. “Paddleton” is so keyed into its protagonists’ various idiosyncrasies that it seems hesitant to grapple with its own central tension. Too often, Andy’s anxiety about Michael’s situation is deflected with humor, which lands only like a pat on the back, never reveling in the absurdity.

In the end, the film takes too long to take itself seriously, and as such it struggles to deliver on its ostensible promise: that two weird men with a close bond will meaningfully confront death and its implications — to themselves and to their friendship. Previous writing-directing work by Duplass with his brother, Jay (“Jeff Who Lives at Home”), could be quietly devastating. “Paddleton” is mostly just quiet.

“Paddleton” is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/movies/paddleton-review.html" id="b09bb6d5-8c0d-3e9f-ab03-10548d29c12e">The New York Times</a>.

When contemplating the subject of dying, Michael (Mark Duplass) can muster little else than “eh.” “Paddleton,” and its gestures toward hushed profundity, might evoke much the same reaction from audiences.

'Paddleton' Review: A Shrug in the Shadow of Death

As gender norms become more elastic, drag has burst like a glitter cannon into the mainstream. Think “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on TV or “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Broadway. Drag queens are appearing more frequently on-screen to “pull the wig down from the shelf,” as Hedwig might put it.

But in three recent films and shows — “A Star Is Born,” “Dumplin'” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — drag queens play second fiddle to the straight women who take center stage. They prod these films and shows, which are all about performers and performances, to work out what “real” and “authentic” mean, sometimes at the cost of the drag stars.

At the beginning of “A Star Is Born,” the director, co-writer and lead Bradley Cooper has his country singer, Jackson Maine, wind up at a drag bar and discover Ally (Lady Gaga, no stranger to drag herself), her fake eyebrows as thin as pencil lines to evoke the French chanteuse whose song she will interpret for the audience. While the show is emceed by DJ “Shangela” Pierce and Willam Belli, actual drag stars, Ally is notably the only performer that night who doesn’t lip-sync, and the only woman, a privilege she acknowledges to Jackson in the dressing room after the show. “I mean they would never normally let a girl sing one of these shows,” she says modestly, “but they’ve always loved my voice. It’s an honor really. I get to be one of the gay girls.”

The movie’s distinction is clear: what the drag queens do is artifice, predicated on a kind of fakery. What Ally does is real, daring to look the audience in the eye as she pauses her performance of “La Vie en Rose” to gaze at Jackson, who gazes at her, because, unlike the other women performing that night, she has truth in her.

It’s that truth that Jackson wants to foster. Ally can accentuate qualities of femininity and female aesthetics for her drag persona, but Jackson sees her talent despite the drag, not the drag as an augmentation of her talent. Fittingly, then, the pop star Ally will eventually become is just another kind of drag queen, all about flashy costumes (orange hair, prismatic colors), her modified persona reliant on what the film sees as soulless excess. While “A Star Is Born” is fond of its drag queens, it ultimately condescends to them. For Jackson, and for the film, the artifice of drag (or pop stardom) is an obstacle to authenticity, not another path to it.

Conversely, the drag queens in the Netflix movie “Dumplin'” encourage Willowdean “Dumplin'” Dickson (Danielle Macdonald) to use the illusion of drag as a way to express her true self. Willowdean is an alienated, overweight high school student and Dolly Parton fan whose mother’s former glories as a pageant queen have dogged her all her life. Spurred by the discovery that her late aunt almost competed for the crown but decided not to, Willowdean signs up for the pageant that made her mother (Jennifer Aniston) famous. But she struggles to really understand why she’s doing it and who she might be if she does enter. Then she learns that her aunt was a beloved patron of a Dolly Parton-themed drag bar.

There, the drag queens Lee (Harold Perrineau) and Candee Disch (Ginger Minj) take Willowdean under their wing, as if teaching her how to use the artifice of performance and femininity to understand her relationship to societal standards of beauty. Lee quotes Parton joyfully saying, “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.” Keen on Willowdean’s mind is the thin line between the personas we create for ourselves and the ones we want to present to the world, whether glamorous or restrained.

In the film’s effort to upend notions that a pageant is a one-dimensional showcase of beauty, one scene is especially striking: Willowdean is finally able to connect with her hitherto neglectful mother, Rosie (Aniston), in a backstage dressing room; they’re both in their own kind of drag, Rosie in the dress and tiara she wore when she won Miss Teen Bluebonnet, and Willowdean in Dolly-as-magician regalia, including ferocious red lipstick, for the competition’s talent section. For them, the performance of beauty can be as honest a place of vulnerability as something more conventional without ornamentation.

So, too, does Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) find comfort, catharsis and truth in performing as a stand-up comic in the Amazon show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” created by Amy Sherman-Palladino. In the Season 2 premiere, her mother has fled to France, frustrated by her marriage and her life in New York. Midge ruminates about her own complicated marriage as she drifts through the streets of Paris, only to end up in a drag bar, where her incisive comedy style, exposing herself in a bracing, sarcastic manner, is juxtaposed against the drag performances, including a trio singing a song about gay Paree.

She’s mesmerized and entirely shocked that they are, in fact, drag queens, blithely unaware of their existence outside this club, never mind in New York, or in the Village where she often performs. She loudly exclaims at how “real” they seem, quipping, “Dammit, your waist is small, smaller than mine.” With an impromptu translator at hand, she delivers a set about her tempestuous marriage, which, even across a language barrier, turns tragic, leaving the crowd in tears. But that’s what makes her brilliant, her husband argues on the phone later: “It’s real, it’s authentic” — no matter how constructed.

As much as I enjoy seeing drag queens sashay across the screen with more frequency, it’s hard to get around the fact that they are, in all three works, primarily playthings or props. It’s not just the condescension in “A Star Is Born.” In “Dumplin'” (directed by Anne Fletcher), Lee is essentially a “magical Negro,” the racist trope of a black character who, without agency of his or her own, doles out wisdom to the main white character. The drag queens in “Mrs. Maisel” are something for her to gawk at and use in her comedy. Because all of these projects are about straight women, the way they depict drag queens feels little more progressive than the convention of the gay best friend, popular in 1990s romantic comedies like “My Best Friend’s Wedding”: neutered, a sidekick existing solely to catalyze change in the main character.

During her set, Midge Maisel riffs on what makes a woman, poking fun at her drag queen props and the ideals that they would have to live up to. Imagine if the actual queens got to express that themselves.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/movies/a-star-is-born-drag-queen.html" id="59e7fccd-dc52-3d2d-a873-1ab491c73b34">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

Drag Queens on the Screen: There to Prove a Woman's Authenticity

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Kyle Turner

Articles written by the author

Queer cinema seen as bridge to future

'Paddleton' Review: A Shrug in the Shadow of Death

Drag Queens on the Screen: There to Prove a Woman's Authenticity