Category: Pride

Now Available: Bitter Years

One of the founders of the Italian Homosexual Liberation Movement, created at the beginning of the 1970s, Mario Mieli was an activist, intellectual, writer, performer and a key figure on the Italian cultural scene.

Though he committed suicide at the age of thirty, he lived a busy and full life, leaving an impression on LGBTQ culture in Italy together with his friends like architect Corrado Levi, painter Piero Fassoni, singer Ivan Cattaneo, activist Angelo Pezzana, writer Fernanda Pivano and poet Milo De Angelis.

Starring Nicola Di Benedetto in the lead role, Bitter Years traces the ups and downs of Mieli’s short, but influential life. According to Andrea Adriatico, the film’s director, “He liked to provoke and to be an innovator but, today, his thought has been completely forgotten.”

“A son of the upper middle class and second to last of seven children, he spent an entire life having a complicated relationship with his parents, Water and Liderica, and the last years of his life were spent with his lover Umberto Pasti, in a very difficult and intense love story.”

Watch the trailer for Bitter Years below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

The award-winning short film Alaska is a Drag tells a fish out of water story… literally

The short film Alaska is a Drag, now available on Dekkoo, is a fish out of water story… literally. The film’s hero, Leo (Martin L. Washington Jr.), is an aspiring superstar stuck working in a fish cannery in Alaska. Leo sees disco balls in the scales of the fish he slices. Everyone who slices fish all day, daydreams – Leo’s are just more glamtastic.

Most of the time, Leo and his twin sister Tristen (Maya Washington) are left to fend for themselves. To escape the monotony of fist fights and fish guts, they create their own magic, the Northern Lights follow them as they vogue down a woodsy path.

They hang out at the one gay bar in a hundred miles, owned by their surly surrogate mom – Jan (Margaret Cho).

Their real mom (Nia Peeples) left years ago and their dad George (Kevin Daniels) preaches on the side of the road. After years of getting beat up by his former best friend, Kyle (Christopher O’Shea), Leo has learned to fight back – his skills catch the eye of his cannery boss, an amateur boxer (Jason Scott Lee) who offers to train him to be a fighter.

And when the new kid in town, Declan (Matt Dallas), wants to be his sparring partner – Leo’s worlds begin to collide, Tristen enters Leo in a drag competition – he’s never performed for anyone but her – the drag audition falls on the same day as the qualifying round for boxing and Leo has to face the real reason he’s afraid to leave Alaska.

Watch the trailer for Alaska is a Drag below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

 

Now Available: At the End of the Day

After losing his wife and counseling practice, the only thing thirty-two-year-old Dave Hopper (Stephen Shane Martin) has going for himself is his part-time professorship at his alma mater, a growing Christian college. And the only reason he even got that job was because his previous professor (Tom Nowicki), now ambitious dean, pulled a few strings.

The Dean’s plans for growth hit a snag when the property he wants to develop has been promised to a gay support group – which has plans to open an LGBT homeless teen shelter if they can raise the money in time. The Dean is forced to take drastic measures, offering Dave his dream job, but he only gets it if he goes undercover in the group as a gay man – the abomination he counsels against – and stops them from raising the funds needed to buy the property.

Dave reluctantly agrees, and for the first time, is met face-to-face with the community he has been battling his entire career. The awkward and emotional experiences that follow lead Dave on a journey of truth, revealing that life and love are not as black and white as he first thought.

The feature-length debut from writer-director Kevin O’Brien, At the End of the Day is a compassionate new comedy drama. Watch the trailer below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

 

Short Film Spotlight: The Gay Rub

The Gay Rub is a project by Steven Reigns devoted to collecting rubbings from LGBTQ historical markers, signs, tombstones, cenotaphs, plaques, and monuments. By gathering LGBTQ rubbings from across the globe, these public historic commemorations can be viewed at once. LGBTQ history and landmarks are underrepresented and underappreciated. The Gay Rub’s aim is to help draw more attention to the markers and the LGBTQ significance that prompted them.

Steven Reigns is a Los Angeles-based poet and educator and was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. Alongside over a dozen chapbooks, he has published collections such as Inheritance and Your Dead Body is My Welcome Mat.

Reigns holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida, a Master of Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, and is an eleven-time recipient of The Los Angeles County’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ Artist in Residency Grant. Currently he is touring The Gay Rub, an exhibition of rubbings from LGBT landmarks, facilitates the monthly Lambda Lit Book Club, and is at work on a new collection of poetry.

Director Michael J. Saul is fairly new to documentary filmmaking, but he was a pioneer in the San Francisco art and film scene of the 1980s, producing a series of experimental films with musical collaborator Steven M. Miller which found success in film festivals around the world. With the new short doc, The Gay Rub, Saul shines a spotlight on the important work that Reigns has been doing and offers viewers an exclusive look at this profoundly impressive collection.

The Gay Rub is now available on Dekkoo.

 

Now Available: Cheetah in August

A former high school track athlete’s distorted views on love, negatively affects the people closest to him in the acclaimed LGBTQ series Cheetah in August.

The show centers around the deep personal journey of the main character, August (Andre Myers), as he examines his life in therapy, from his high school years into adulthood. At the start of the season we are introduced to August’s alter ego, “Cheetah”, who is the main force preventing August from enjoying a monogamous relationship with his current lover. As a large cast of characters are soon introduced, they intertwine within a web of sex, lies, deception, and murder.

Sexuality, love, religion, psychology and self-hate are all themes that are touched on throughout Cheetah in August, which proudly aims to raise awareness of societal issues often swept under the rug. Series creator Anthony Bawn has said that he hopes to use the show to explore ideas of ethnic LGBTQ identity through a “mentally confused young adult searching for normalcy” and that he pictured how a young black male growing up in a religious family could develop social desegregation within the gay community.

Watch the trailer for Cheetah in August below. The first two twelve-episode seasons are available now on Dekkoo.

Buddies is an intensely personal study of love, death, and the need for activism

David (David Schachter), a naive graduate student, has volunteered to work as a ‘buddy’ for people dying of AIDS. Assigned to the intensely political Robert (Geoff Edholm), a lifelong activist whose friends and family have abandoned him following his diagnosis, the two men, each with notably different world views, soon discover common bonds, as David’s inner activist awakens and Robert’s need for emotional release is fulfilled.

The first narrative feature film made about the AIDS crisis, acclaimed independent filmmaker Arthur Bressan Jr’s (Passing Strangers, Abuse) Buddies is an intensely personal study of love, death, and the need for activism during the earliest years of the LGBTQ community’s fight for survival.

Structured like a filmed play, Buddies turned out to be Bressan’s final film, as he too would fall victim to AIDS barely two years after its completion.

Nearly impossible to see following its brief theatrical release and never officially released on home video, Buddies is available now on Dekkoo, newly restored from a long-lost 16mm negative. You can watch the original 1985 trailer below.

Pride Month Spotlight: Church & State

A surprise federal court ruling in 2013 legalized gay marriage for Utah – triggering a fierce battle in a state where Mormon church values control the Legislature and every aspect of public life.

Church & State, the bold, award-winning documentary from co-directors Holly Tuckett and Kendall Wilcox, tells the improbable story of a brash, inexperienced gay activist and a tiny Salt Lake City law firm that joined forces to topple Utah’s gay marriage ban.

The film’s ride on the bumpy road to equality in Utah offers a glimpse at the Mormon Church’s influence in state politics and the squabbles inside the gay community that nearly derailed a chance to make history.

Church & State is a story of triumph, setback and a little-known lawsuit that should have failed, but instead paved the way for the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay unions nationwide.

Watch the trailer for Church & State below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

New This Week – 6/26/20

In this poignant gay cinema classic, the first film to deal with the AIDS epidemic, a New York City gay man in a monogamous relationship becomes a “buddy” or a volunteer friend to another gay man dying of AIDS. Director by Arthur J. Bressan Jr. died of complications from AIDS two years after the film was released. ‘Buddies’ is available to stream on Dekkoo!

A former high school track athlete’s distorted views on love, negatively affects the people closest to him. Watch season 1 and season 2 of ‘Cheetah in August’ now on Dekkoo!

Dave and Andrew reach a new level of closeness in their relationship when they share their personal experiences with self-harm. ‘Vertical Lines’ is now available on Dekkoo!

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Coming next week: Two Naked Gay Guys returns!

Embrace a Whole New World with Trade

Michael (Austin Miller) is an intelligent, well-spoken corporate transaction analysis attorney. Very successful, he is highly regarded in his firm and by his colleagues. Married for ten years, he genuinely cares for his wife – and knows that she desperately wants to have a baby. He wants her to be happy and agrees to go to a fertility specialist to help the process along. However, Michael has a secret life. He likes to dress up as a woman and be with men.

When Michael meets Shawn (T. Ashanti Mozelle), he is introduced to a world he has only ever dreamed of, and finally embraces his true self.

A confident, outspoken and amiable African American male, Shawn describes himself as a gay black man. He has not had an easy life. He unknowingly took the wrap for another person’s crime, and served time in prison. Now living with his aunt, he regularly works the night shift on the boulevard dressed up as a woman named Coco, selling himself to men.

When he meets Michael, he is intrigued – and encourages Michael to become the person he longs to be.

A powerful and compassionate drama about friendship and hidden desire, Trade is now available on Dekkoo. Watch the trailer below.

Pride Month Spotlight: Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine

On the night of October 6, 1998, two men lured Matthew Shepard, a gay freshman at the University of Wyoming, from a bar in Laramie, WY. He was kidnapped and driven to a field where he was tortured and tethered to a fence and left to die. Never regaining consciousness, Matthew succumbed to the severe injuries from the attack and died on October 12, 1998.

The murder of Matthew Shepard was a devastating tragedy that made countless headlines around the world. As people denounced the hatred and senseless violence that caused Matthew’s death, a much-needed dialogue about hate crimes and intolerance against the LGBT community began and continues to this day.

Matthew’s tragic story brought the reality of inequality and vicious, irrational contempt into the public consciousness and set the stage for the landmark Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009. 

The documentary Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine follows director Michele Josue, a close friend of Matt’s, as she travels to pivotal locations in Shepard’s life, interviewing other friends and family members, and gaining insight into the beautiful life and devastating loss of Matthew Shepard.

While we’ve come a long way, LGBT inequality and hate crimes are still very real today, and parts of Matt’s story are unfortunately still very much a part of young people’s realities. Though framed through a very personal lens, Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine tells a universal story that highlights the responsibility we have now to make sure young people around the world are not at risk of falling victim to the same story ending Matt was.

Watch the trailer for Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.