2210-f

[guysonfilms]

10 Hidden Gems About Queer Male Desire

1.       L’Homme Blessé (Dir: Patrice Chéreau, 1983, France)

Masterfully acted by Jean-Hugues Anglade and directed by the great French filmmaker Patrice Chéreau, this film is a daring and ahead-of-its-time portrait of the anguishes of a young gay man in love with a manipulative criminal.

2.       The Garden (Derek Jarman, 1990, United Kingdom)

The great Derek Jarman delivers a visual and metaphorical narrative about the struggles of the gay community having to face oppression, criminalization, stigmatization and society’s homophobia. With his current collaborator, Tilda Swinton, Jarman makes an experimental movie that is very poetical, haunting and unique.

3.       Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien, 1991, United Kingdom)

A great exponent of the New Queer Cinema. This film touches the subjects of racism, homophobia, black and queer identity, contracultural movements, police violence, punk music, love and desire. A rare kind of film that speaks of themes rarely seen on the big screen even nowadays. It tells the story of the friends Chris and Caz, who run a pirate radio station from a tower block in Dalston, East London.

4.       Dong gong xi gong (East Palace, West Palace) (Yuan Zhang, 1996, China)

The first Mainland Chinese movie with an explicitly homosexual theme. The film tells the story of a young gay writer A-Lan who, being attracted to a young policeman, manages to have himself interrogated for a whole night. In placing the openly gay protagonist and the homophobic policeman alone in a room, the movie was able to explore the relations of power, masculinity, and repressed desire with a haunting and, at the same time, sensual atmosphere.

5.       Wild Side (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2004, France)

The film is a tender and melancholic portrait of three outsiders who love each other: Stéphanie, a transsexual prostitute; Djamel, an Egyptian hustler and Mikhail, a Russian man who works in a restaurant. Fluid and working like an everyday simple tale, the movie showcases these three characters in a very intimate and sincere way.

6.       Soundless Wind Chime (Kit Hung, 2009, Hong-Kong/ Switzerland/ Germany)

An impressionist tale of love, grief and regret which tells the story of Ricky, who leaves Hong-Hong to look for the lost soul and the past of his deceased Swiss lover, Pascal. Ricky struggles with the confusion of memories, reality and illusion.

7.       L’Armée du Salut (Abdellah Taia, 2013, France/ Marocco)

The Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, debuts his filmmaking with an autobiographical adaptation of his homonymous novel. A crude, realistic and intimate coming-of-age about the formation of identity, sexuality and desire and that showcases the difficulties of immigrants in France.

8.       Onthakan (The Blue Hour) (Anucha Boonyawatana, 2015, Thailand)

A genre-bending love story about a bullied loner, Tam, who finds solace in the arms of Phum, a boy he meets at a haunted swimming pool. The Blue Hour is a thriller with glances of horror and teenage romance. Sometimes tender, sometimes disturbing, this film is very unlike and unique.

9.       Spa Night (Andrew Ahn, 2016, United States)

This minimalistic sensorial film is a hauntingly blurry study on repression, tradition, foreignness, desire and family bound. It tells the story of David, a Korean-American teenager who starts working in a spa to help his struggling family. There he has contact with gay men who uses the spa for sex, and this new reality both scares and excites him.

10.   Corpo Elétrico (Body Electric) (Marcelo Caetano, 2017, Brazil)

This film is a fluid and naturalistic study of the every-day-life of factory workers in the northeast of Brazil. The protagonist is Elias, a gay young man who spends his days working in a fabric factory, having love affairs and getting out with his friends. This movie works like a chronic full of energy, love, truth and an elegant simplicity.

[ozu-teapot]

Les nuits de la pleine lune (AKA Full Moon in Paris) | Eric Rohmer | 1984

[regularlesbian]

Remember that the military was never there to keep you safe. It’s there to keep global capital safe.

[filmaticbby]

Masculin Féminin (1966) dir. Jean-Luc Godard

[smilesinsecret-blog]

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten every five minutes a woman is raped/every ten minutes a lil girl is molested yet i rode the subway today i sat next to an old man who may have beaten his old wife 3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago he might have sodomized his daughter but i sat there cuz the young men on the train might beat some young women later in the day or tomorrow i might not shut my door fast every 3 minutes it happens some woman’s innocence rushes to her cheeks/pours from her mouth like the betsy wetsy dolls have been torn apart/their mouths menses red & split/every three minutes a shoulder is jammed through plaster and the oven door/ chairs push thru the rib cage/hot water or boiling sperm decorate her body i rode the subway today & bought a paper from a man who might have held his old lady onto a hot pressing iron/i don’t know maybe he catches lil girls in the park & rips open their behinds with steel rods/i can’t decide what he might have done i only know every 3 minutes every 5 minutes every 10 minutes/so i bought the paper looking for the announcement the discovery/of the dismembered woman’s body/the victims have not all been identified/today they are naked and dead/refuse to testify/one girl out of 10’s not coherent/i took the coffee & spit it up/i found an announcement/not the woman’s bloated body in the river/floating not the child bleeding in the 59th street corridor/not the baby broken on the floor/ there is some concern that alleged battered women might start to murder their husbands & lovers with no immediate cause’ i spit up i vomit i am screaming we all have immediate cause every 3 minutes every 5 minutes every 10 minutes every day women’s bodies are found in alleys & bedrooms/at the top of the stairs before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink coffee/i must know/ have you hurt a woman today did you beat a woman today throw a child across a room are the lil girl’s panties in yr pocket did you hurt a woman today i have to ask these obscene questions the authorities require me to establish immediate cause every three minutes every five minutes every ten minutes every day.

“With No Immediate Cause,” Ntozake Shange (via smilesinsecret-blog)

[zzzze]

Lee Friedlander Miles Davis, n.d. Dye transfer print :)

[metaphorformetaphor]

How do you know I’m what you see?

James Baldwin, from Giovanni’s Room (Vintage, 2013; first published 1956)

[ankosv]

I don’t like to own things, I feel freer when I don’t own things. Silence is very important to me. I find being alone rather relaxing.

Rei Kawakubo in i-D, 1992 (via ankosv)

[adv3nturelust]

This is it: this is your sign. You’re brand new, refreshed, empowered to change. Your calmer, softer times are coming. Your confidence, your happiness, your bliss, is arriving. Self acceptance is easier, and taking care of yourself is no longer a chore, but something you look forward to. You start to feel replenished - you’re *you* again - and the next chapter of your happier life begins now.

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

You have to get to the point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else.

Unknown (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

[lonniiii-deactivated20170829]

If you’re serious about change, you have to go thru uncomfortable situations & stop trying to dodge the process. It’s the only way to grow.

[beyonslayed]

Not to start drama but y'all can keep Anderson Cooper’s video about Haiti - the comment about mother nature punishing Haiti is flat out false. The devestation resulting from the natural disasters that have struck Haiti in the last decade is the direct result of US/Western management of economic and political affairs: the opening of American textile sweatshops in Port-au-prince is what attracted countryside Haitians to move to the capital leading to its ‘overpopulation’ resulting in the earthquake being as catastrophic as it was (the southernmost parts of Haiti where the earthquake first touched did not face nearly the same devestation as the capital where, to this day, the presidential palace remains not yet reconstructed; the mismanagement of recovery efforts by the Clintons at this point is a well known tale; UN peacekeepers poisoned thousands more with cholera, a disease not seen on the island in over a century, while raping Haitian women and trafficking Haitian children; Clinton’s economic policy of American into the Haitian economy led to the devestation of the country’s agriculture forcing many to migrate to the capital or deforest the mountainsides to turn trees into charcoal. This deforestation is what has made hurricane seasons particularly deadly on that side of the island resulting in floods and mudslides; we don’t even need to go into how, with the exception of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, most Haitian presidents/leaders have been US installed/backed puppets. The narrative that Haiti’s woes are the result of haphazard natural disasters - which fail to even account for the role of climate change in the intensification of these - is lazy considering the US has been strongly meddling in Haitian affairs for over a century now. While it warms my heart to see heartwarming, positive representations of Haiti reaching millions of Americans in the wake of Trump’s ‘shithole country’ comment glossing over the US’s role in making Haiti the shithole that it is just won’t fly with me.

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

This is one of neoliberalism’s most brilliant sleights of hand: whittle government down to its most noxious functions, generate such hostility to the state that people cannot conceive of a benign, much less helpful or just, state; sit back and wait until people cease to demand assistance and then grow suspicious and even hostile toward it.

Judith Levine, “Sympathy for the Devil” in The War on Sex (163)

[cruciform-solidarity]

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.

Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand. – Rilke, Book of Hours 

[2210-f]

Excerpt from Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, by RAINER MARIA RILKE

This woman who was loved so much, that from

one lyre

more mourning came than from women in mourning;

that a whole world was made from mourning, where

everything was present once again: forest and valley

and road and village, field, river, and animal;

and that around this mourning-world, just as

around the other earth, a sun

and a silent star-filled sky wheeled,

a mourning-sky with displaced constellations--:

this woman who was loved so much . . .

But she walked alone, holding the god's hand,

her footsteps hindered by her long graveclothes,

faltering, gentle, and without impatience.

She was inside herself, like a great hope,

and never thought of the man who walked ahead

or the road that climbed back toward life.

She was inside herself. And her being dead

filled her like tremendous depth.

As a fruit is filled with its sweetness and darkness

she was filled with her big death, still so new

that it hadn't been fathomed.

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/nicole-krauss-review-gass-and-rilke

[2210-f]

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

[2210-f]

“Italians, Jews, and Slavs were considered non-white in popular political discourse of the late 19th and early 20th century, and this discourse grew very influential in the anti-immigration movement, leading eventually, in the 1920s, to severe restrictions against entry of supposedly "non-white" groups to this country. This popular pseudo-science made it into the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, supporting immigration restrictions against the "Alpine" and the "Mediterranean" races, described as the long-skulled, slow, peasant stock people of Central Europe, etc. Most of these immigrants were not running around in the 19th and early 20th century proudly announcing that they're Italian Americans or Slavic Americans because at the time, it was often very dangerous and at least a disadvantage to be identified that way. I think we call these groups an ethnicity and not a race now, because those categories have actually changed. This is due in large part to a series of policy decisions that gave some groups certain advantages in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, allowing them to be part of an ever-expanding "white" race. The political context and the power context changes. Ethnicity, like race, takes on different meanings.”

- David Freud in a discussion on the differences between ethnicity and race