Yukio Mishima (1925- 1970)
Work: Confessions of A Mask
Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life In Chapters stands as my favorite biopic. Mishima has written several books now considered classics, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace to the Sea, Sun and Steel. But it is probably his autobiography, Confessions of A Mask that pierces through his ouevre. Perhaps more known for committing seppuku on November 25, 1970 after breaking into a Tokyo military base and trying to inspire th Japan Self-Defense Forcs to rise up and overthrow Japan's 1947 Constitution. While I don't agree with his politics, his fierceness reflected through his prose make him stand out as one of the eminent writers in Japanese fiction.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922- 1975)
Work: Teorema
Out of everything Pasolini has done, it is Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom that has outshined all of it. It's become something of a "dare" movie in the vein of Cannibal Holocaust, but it's so much more. His other work includes The Trilogy of Life, a series of films based on The Decameron, Arabian Knights and Canterbury Tales. Art should be confrontational. And that is what you get when you watch a film from Pasolini.
Wakefield Poole (1936- 2021)
Work: Bijou
One of the major queer filmmakers working in the adult film industry in the porno chic era, Wakefield Poole is most known for Boys In the Sand. The film would change gay men's lives and make Fire Island an international tourist destination. It helped introduce straight audiences to gay sex in a positive and beautifully shot way. His subsequent films, Bijou and Bible! would push the artistic envelope even further.
Marlon Riggs (1957- 1994)
Work: Tongues Untied
The first work of his I came across is Tongues Untied. It combined spoken word, vogueing, snap tutorials, GBA hotlines, doo-wop groups, and gay rights march documentary footage into a work existing outside the realm of cinema. It's a work that crystallises a time (the AIDs epidemic) and a feeling (the anger and alienation of being a gay black man) perfectly. A sprawling and dense yet direct work that I cannot recommend highly enough.
Criterion has in the past year released The Signifyin' Work of Marlon Riggs. I highly recommend picking it up during the next Barnes and Noble sale.
Scissor Sisters
Work: Ta Dah
Modern day glam doesn't get as theatrical or as dance inducing as this band. Just listen to Land of A Thousand Words and tell me it doesn't remind you of a lost theme to a James Bond film. Or the feeling of being in a nightclub with the album Night Work. So if you need a band to get you ass bumpin', Scissor Sisters are the ones for you.
Randy Shilts (1951- 1994)
Work: And the Band Played On
"I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story."
"There was this perception that I was out to subvert gay-rights and I didn't care about civil liberties and civil rights. To me, the overriding issue was that civil rights wouldn't do us any good if we were all dead from the disease."
Randy Shilt's And the Band Played On is the seminal work on the AIDs epidemic. I remember being red in the face with rage at the Reagan administration at just how callous they were toward the gay community during a public health crisis. It was made into a TV movie by Roger Spottiswoode with an all star cast. Don't take the words TV movie lightly either. It's a powerful document of a specific moment in our human experiment.
Ocean Vuong (1988- )
Work: Night Sky With Exit Wounds
Out of the forms of fiction, poetry would be the one that least interest me. Ocean Vuong came on my radar after going to the Unabridged Bookstore in the Belmont area of Chicago. It's known for it's second to none LGBTQ selection. One of the staff picks was Night Sky With Exit Wounds. I decided to check it out. Ocean's collection revolves around many themes- romance, family, grief, war and melancholia. He's written a novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous that I have yet to read.
John Waters (1946- )
Work: Female Trouble
"If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."
I live and die by this quote. Besides being an advocate for the printed word, he is an inspired filmmaker. Known for his work with Divine in films like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living, he managed to craft one of my favorite comedies of the 90's in Serial Mom. I was lucky enough to attend a speaking event where he promoted his new book Mr. Know It All. His gift with words and storytelling was apparent just by listening to him talk about the Dreamlanders, his experiences with LSD and his love of his hometown Baltimore.
David Wojnarowicz (1954- 1992)
Work: Close to the Knives
Close to the Knives is a molotov cocktail of a book. It's abrasive, self-eviscerating, and entirely unsentimental. It is boiling over with anger and lust and menace. The book acts as both a memoir of David's traumatic childhood and a searing indictment of the American state's network of oppression.
These past few days have been obsidian black in their darkness. So I'll just end this series with a quote from the book to sum up how I feel.
"We are living in a society that has accelerated to such a point that the person to press the button that releases the nuclear warheads, the person who determines whether some of us have rights to abortion, the person who determines whether men can love men or women can love women or whether I should have to die of lack of access to healthcare because I'm Black or Hispanic or poor and White or Native American...that person no longer has to go to the scene of the crime to do their dirty work. The people making these determinations that affect our bodies and minds need only to do legislative paperwork. It's clean, efficient and leaves no blood or fingerprints on or from the hands of those persons. Paperwork erases the distance between manicured hands and the stench of rotting corpses."
