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Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue 19 | July 1997

film festival coverage

Queer Voices: The 1997 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival — The world's biggest lesbian and gay filmfest shows the pleasures and pitfalls of gay auteurs caught between assimilation and opposition. Watch out for the "Stepford" homosexual!

A New Kind of Tranny: Different for Girls — In a cinema crowded with self-conscious transgressions, Kim offers the real article when she strips to show her straight boyfriend the thrilling secrets of the altered body.

Gay USA — Queer activism circa 1977 showed a diverse optimistic community moving ever closer to unity — before the body blow of AIDS.

The Penis in the Festival — And you thought the lavender-haired titmouse was an endangered species! Penises are hard to find even in gay movies that ought to know better.

Hong Kong's “Who's the Man?” series — Hong Kong's gender-benders are the stuff of legend; director Patrick Chan adds two key works to the canon in these 1996 bookend satires of fame, pop music, and forbidden kisses.

camp classics

A Mannequin's Face: Joan Crawford — The scathing last word on the patron saint of drag n' camp, the Queen of the Land of the Cinema, La Divina Jona!

Sexual Subversion: The Bride of Frankenstein — No institution — society, religion, marriage, or heterosexuality — was safe from the penetrating queer eye of James Whale. Make way for the homosexual creator!

a queer classic (?) revisited

Camera as Cocksucker: Rene Clement's Purple Noon — Noon isn't the only thing that's purple in this bizarre continental ode to Alain Delon's crotch

television

In the Life — PBS' queer newsmagazine