actor profiles mailing list
animation
book reviews
director profiles
documentaries
experimental &
avant garde
exploitation
film festivals
film noir
film reviews
gay & lesbian
hong kong films
horror
interviews
japanese cinema
music & musicals
silent film
tranny cinema
- - - - - -
To be automatically notified when the next issue is posted, join our mailing list.
writers gone wild!
Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by visiting our companion blog, Bright Lights After Dark.
our space at MySpace
Visit us at MySpace.
support
Support Bright Lights and get something nice for yourself, too, by shopping at Amazon via this link
 |
 |
What treasure do the tight levis and binding boxers conceal? The Absolution of Anthony |
For those of our readers who prefer anatomy to artistry, or more coarsely, meat to melodrama, we offer the following consumer guide. There's no need to wade through the acres of cinema that comprise this year's San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival if all you really want to know — as so many of us do — is which films show, in a fleeting glimpse, half-light, or extended mesmerizing sequence, our spongy-tissued little pal. This survey is by no means complete, and we encourage readers who encounter full-frontal male nudity in films not mentioned here to spread the word among their fellow penisspotters.
There appear to be fewer treasures in this realm than last year, but the diligent dickophile can find ample reason to patronize the largest lesbian and gay film festival in the world. Some of the sightings this year were in expected places. The shorts program Porn Dogs is a virtual phallic feast. Nguyen Tan's These Are My Favorite Things finds us in agreement with the title as a BFD (big fat dick) has its way with an enthusiastic partner. Steve Reinke's Andy contrasts the pleasures of the penis with the terrors of home decorating, courtesy of “Andy”'s insistence on talking about wall sconces and crown molding while kneading his substantial schlong. Most outrageous is Pansexual Public Porn, by the well-named Del LaGrace Volcano. Volcanic indeed are real-life scenes of public mouth-fucking, fisting, pissing, and lurid FTM sexual hijinx.
Leave it to the Germans to elaborate on the primacy of the prick. Rosa von Praunheim rescues the stranded cockwatcher with Gay Courage, an otherwise overlong documentary with painfully bad historical recreations. A parade of penises make this necessary if not always rewarding viewing. Rosa's spiritual brother, Jochen Hick, interviewed nine men involved with porn, modeling, hustling, etc. in Sex/Life in L.A. Hardcore highlights include Madonna's ex-boyfriend Tony Ward masturbating in the bathtub, and porn prince Matt Bradshaw using his massive manmeat on various hapless accomplices. Fans of the literal cutting-edge may appreciate performance artist Ron Athey's ball lacerations and related penis presentation. (For those who want more of this human veg-o-matic, see Catherine Saalfield's documentary Hallelujah!)
Some of this year's prick appearances are barely walk-ons, much less hard-ons. In Waris Husseins's Sixth Happiness, a queen dwarf and his sister titter when they glimpse a naked man in a magazine. Jimmy Smallhorne's 2 x 4, a drama about the working-class Irish, has a few dick scenes, but they're mostly swaddled in shadows. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's Party Monster, about the navel-gazing queen-murderer Michael Alig of The Club Kids fame, has some brief cock images, but the context is so repellent that only the most diehard dickwatchers will want to add this one to their list.
Still, these are better than those films that practically scream for schlong but don't have any. Bernard Salzman's The Unknown Cyclist has the gorgeous Danny Nucci mostly in bicycle leotards, but this wretched “AIDS movie” refuses to make good on this promise and show us Danny's no-doubt mesmerizing goods. His tantalizing suggestion of a dick-measuring contest, which fails to materialize, is bitter icing on an inedible cake. Together Alone is another AIDS-inflected story that fails in the dick department, in spite of the dramatic desirability of full-frontal nudity in a movie where much of the characters' midnight chatter is about sex. Ferzan Ozpetek's Turkish/Italian production Steam is another one filled with fetching men who regrettably never take it off. Culture mavens will be rightly thrilled that Dakan, a superb gay African feature (from Guinea) even got released, but the fanatic phallophile may not forgive the lack of dick shots of the film's two beautiful leading men.
The most scintillating of this year's cock tableaux belong not to this year but to the 1970s. The purest example is James Broughton's Hermes Bird (1979), a seven-minute single shot of a penis first in repose, then brought to reassuring stiffness. “Firearm of my spirit,” says Broughton in a poetic overdub, “all that flows into flame.” Yes, James, exactly. Paul Morrisey's Trash (1970) is remarkable for a lot of things, not least of which is an ongoing display of Joe Dallesandro's consecrated cock in a happy variety of situations. Ironically, this icon-stud plays an impotent junkie, but Warhol superstar Jane Forth, seeing the objet d'sacre for the first time, says it all in a mantra that devoted dicksters will repeat like a Buddhist chant: “Oh my — you're rather large.”
June 1998 | Issue 21
Copyright © 1998 by Gary Morris
More festival coverage: Queer Innovators and Queer Cartoons
More penisspotting: Penisspotting 2002, Penisspotting 2001, Penisspotting 2000, Penisspotting 1999, and The Penis in the Festival '97
Also: More gay and lesbian cinema