Queer

I t’s a chilly Sunday night in Manhattan’s West Village and somehow the hottest ticket in town involves a sexually repressed Abraham Lincoln, hoop skirts, and comedian Cole Escola in a wildly convincing nineteenth-century wig.  There’s a line down the block outside the Lucille Lortel Theatre, and inside, the energy builds as patrons make their way through packed halls and walkways to their seats. Queer isn’t just a vibe here, it’s built into the streets — just three blocks from the Stonewall Inn — etched…

For the average individual, work makes up about ⅓ of their life. Everyone should have the freedom to not have to hide essential parts of their identity from their colleagues, business partners, or, in the case of startup founders — investors. Unfortunately, this is still far from reality.  While the tech industry is supposedly at the forefront of humanity’s drive for innovation, many people in the LGBTQIA+ community working in tech suffer as a result of archaic and obsolete prejudices. Often,…

Every year, the Sundance Film Festival premieres a diverse array of movies from independent spaces in the hopes of them crossing over as mainstream hits. Past Sundance movies include (500) Days of Summer, Memento, Whiplash and Reservoir Dogs. Among the new films that premiered at the Utah festival this week is Ponyboi, which not only boasts an impressive dramatic performance from Dylan O’Brien, but makes for a historic moment of representation in LGBTQ+ cinema. On behalf of CinemaBlend, I was among select press that had…

All film noirs start with a bad decision. Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass’s follow-up to her cult horror movie Saint Maud and the most case-hardened Southwestern pulp this side of Jim Thompson, kicks off with a doozy. Lou (Kristen Stewart) cleans toilets and works the desk at a gym in New Mexico. Rebecca (Katy O’Brian), a would-be competitive bodybuilder, has just breezed into town and strolls in for a workout. Soon, these two will spend long nights ravaging each other, dumping corpses, dodging bullets, and running for…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeI am about to see the new Mean Girls reboot with a group of giddy, extremely savvy and cine-literate LGBT+ teens. While we’re waiting, the group discusses the original film. Turns out this lot are obsessed. Released in 2004, Tina Fey’s wickedly quotable teen romcom – starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams – remains a queer classic. And not only because of the abundance of queer…

Sometimes a piece of content is perfectly designed to send various parts of the internet into a Tasmanian devil-style (cartoon NOT animal) whirlwind. The latest one surrounds a 5,000-word opinion piece written for the New York Times by an editor and member of the Gaylor community – people who theorise that Taylor Swift is secretly queer and has left clues and codes along her career to indicate so. The piece validated the corner of the internet that believes the theory, and caused controversy in three others , including a…

Queer pop dominated 2023. At a time of escalating attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, including a wave of anti-trans laws and book bans, trans and queer artists continued to define and shape trends in music and culture.Some songwriters reflected the sorrow of the year with stirring protest songs and reflections on grief and loss. Others released club tracks that called for escapism on the dancefloor, and anthems that celebrated queer joy and sex. Fearmongering campaigns meant to dehumanize drag performers and non-binary people did…

When Andrew Haigh was shooting his new film, All of Us Strangers, in his parents’ old house in Croydon, something strange began to happen. “I started getting eczema again, and I’d not had eczema since I was a kid,” says the director, who is now 50. “It was coming up in the exact same places. I thought, ‘What the fuck is happening to me?’ I feel there is a sense that your body remembers trauma. Somehow things get almost embedded in your DNA, and they find ways to leak out.”In All of Us Strangers, this leakage happens to…

Have you heard the story about crabs in a bucket? When one tries to escape, others claw it down, giving rise to the term “crab mentality”. I find the tale, often proffered with trite self-help nuggets, grating. Not only do we ascribe imagined motivations to crabs, we place them in a situation they would have never encountered without human intervention and then make generalizations about their “mentality”. Narratives that unfold parallelly even as they inform each other. (Little, Brown and Company) Beyond…

It's one of the most talked-about titles on the 2024 movie schedule, so it's not a surprise that the stars of the new Mean Girls musical movie were nervous about remaking the beloved 2004 teen comedy. That included Damian actor Jaquel Spivey, and he recently opened up about joining the project, as well as the importance of queer representation in the OG film and this musical adaptation of it. During an EW roundtable to discuss the upcoming adaptation, Mean Girls cast member Jaquel Spivey—who plays Janis' gay BFF Damian…