The Year in Queer Movies

Maurice Jamal’s Southern-fried family comedy Dirty Laundry fared a bit better, although mostly because it represents a change in the gay film landscape. For one, it’s a gay homecoming story that’s as sweet and inoffensive as any Hallmark Hall-of-Fame special. For another, it’s one of the few gay films featuring an almost all African-American cast to get even a limited release.

Eytan Fox’s critically acclaimed The Bubble (Ha-Buah) gave U.S. audiences the same keen insight into gay life for Israeli youths as his previous films, the audience favorites Yossi & Jagger (2002) and Walk on Water (2004). The film was well received and enjoyed a limited release here in the States, and solidified Fox’s standing as one of the most insightful and prolific gay filmmakers working today.

Rounding out the list is the curious Hollywood afterthought The Walker, in which writer/director Paul Schrader reimagines his notorious American Gigolo (1980) character as a gay escort in Washington D.C. (played in this incarnation by Woody Harrelson). While Harrelson’s charming Carter Page is gay and has a relationship with a man (Run Lola Run’s [1998] dangerously handsome Mauritz Bleibtreu), the bulk of the thin mystery film centers on the dealings he has with an array of politicians’ wives embroiled in a low-burn murder scandal. It’s interesting to have a gay man in the lead, but it’s really not a central element of the story.

Documentaries: Four slices of gay life

Two exceptional documentaries about gay people and gay life in America today got decent play this year.

The first and most high-profile is For the Bible Tells Me So, filmmaker Daniel Karslake’s investigation into the intersection of faith and sexuality. The film is informative (scripture scholars present arguments that the Bible doesn’t actually condemn homosexuality at all) and deeply moving in its central stories, which detail how various families of faith have come to terms with having a gay child. Included in the film are Gene Robinson, the first ever openly gay Anglican Bishop, and political activist Crissy Gephardt, daughter of Congressman Richard Gephardt.

The film is a must-see for anyone with an interest in the dialogue amongst the faithful, and of particular interest to gay people of faith who have found themselves at odds with the communities who raised them.