Festival Report: Wicked Queer 2020

Photo courtesy Beyza Burcak.

21 July 2020 ∙ Originally published in Dig Boston

(Presented below are excerpts written by me from a larger staff piece)

Early into the pandemic, LGBTQ+ Twitter users joked about the inevitability of think pieces on “Queering the Quarantine” and the ways that social distancing would change the community’s sense of identity. Those were, in fact, published, and you’re more than welcome to go relitigate your queerness on your own time if you so choose. But so much of queer life is centered around breaking out of isolation—be it through nightclubs, book clubs, or film festivals (cinema clubs!): We’re a clubby bunch drawn to our shared experiences, so it came as welcome news that Wicked Queer would take place virtually for its 36th edition. 

Looking at this year’s selection in the midst of all this, the very things that would normally put me off a lineup—more shorts programs than features, less big-name narrative releases, a heavy documentary load—now seem vital. And those among us who have accepted the Black (Trans) Lives Matter movement’s invitation to educate ourselves by diversifying the content we absorb will be sated by the fest’s globe-trotting stories, often told by members of the communities being depicted, heard speaking their own words.

Of course they’re not all winners. There’s the usual horny shlock, the self-serious bores, the basic-tired-romance-but-now-it’s-gay stories, and the pedestrian misfires you’ll find in every festival. But even in those films, there’s a heartening sense of honesty that’s been missing from a lot of queer cinema lately: Reckoning with a period that saw Moonlight (2016) win Best Picture and Love, Simon (2018) spawn a Disney-funded spinoff, queer(er) cinema continues to ease into the mainstream and leave its indieness behind—and successful or not, the voices featured in this year’s festival fill the eccentric, artsy, and as-yet-unknown gaps left in those multiplex sensations’ wake.

Trans and genderqueer stories are front and center, thank fucking God. Not that I’d turn down a good ole’ Handsome Cis Gay movie or anything—but they’ve had their moment. Let’s have more like Lingua Franca, more like Queen of Lapa, more like Pier Kids: The Life—which I believe to be not only a worthy successor to Paris Is Burning (1990) and companion to TV’s Pose (2018-), but a major work of its own for appreciating the spiritual descendents of our Stonewall heroes of color. There are trans stories of all lengths and sizes–perhaps easier to digest than the queer/race theory we should be reading, but equally intimate and impactful.

As much as I’ll miss setting up shop at my beloved Brattle for hours upon hours of LGBTQ+ cinema, I’m excited to consume queer art the way I grew up doing it: from my room, from my laptop, texting friends about it, searching for it on message boards, and hoping someone else saw what I did. At a time when major film studios have shown their true colors and abandoned audiences, Wicked Queer has given the community’s persistent rainbow a chance to keep shining. —Juan A. Ramirez

Image from Ask Any Buddy, courtesy American Genre Film Archive

Ask Any Buddy

Directed by Evan Purchell. US, 2020, 78 minutes.

Streaming on Sunday, July 26, 7pm.

For years porn was the only way for queer people to see themselves on screen as they were, in their own terms. The act of securing financing, engaging a willing crew, and distributing gay pornography was not only dangerous and criminal, but heroic. Those obstacles were the gatekeeper trampled over by these invaluable works of film art, which so often displayed a care for cinematic form and lived-in detail that somehow matched the nuances of the queer realities and fantasies they represented.

Kaleidoscopic not only in structure but in its hypnotic style, Ask Any Buddy is far more than the mere best-of compilation it could’ve been. Historian Evan Purchell—whose exhaustive work cataloguing queer films I’ve followed for years—has assembled footage from over 100 films ranging 1968-1986 to ravishing effect. It’s not all blowjobs and poppers (though there is plenty of that), but also tender moments of clubbing and protesting, cruising and existing. 

It comes as the final blow to porn’s intrinsic collapsing of reality and artifice: These two strangers did not meet organically at the Chelsea piers, but that is irrelevant to the final act—sex is set to film, and a Kleenex is thrown away some time after. Seeing the footage all these decades later, the Kleenex takes on a touching new dimension. [⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐] —JAR

Dry Wind

Directed by Daniel Nolasco. Brazil, 2020, 110 minutes.

Streaming on Saturday, July 25, 7pm.

At long last, a film comes along that dares ask the question, “Are all Brazilian men gay?” The first half of Dry Wind—with its bulging muscles and muscly bulges—certainly asks, but suffocates itself with style before arriving at any answers. It’s mostly a standard “lone wolf ogles and lusts through hypersexualized environments” thriller, which it does very well. Cinematographer Larry Machado shoots Brazil’s arid Catalão region with a striking eroticism that zeroes in on the sweatier aspects of sun-beaten life, creating an everyone’s-gay fantasia prime for midnight viewing.

But let’s not beat around an untrimmed bush. The sex in this film—and this is a horny film—is some of the most jaw-dropping I’ve seen. The neon-lit club scene, a requisite for gay cinema, here features a fantasy of unbridled, unsimulated (!) oral sex that I will be hard-pressed to forget. It’s easy to wonder if it would be better off leaning into its art-porn tendencies rather than vague social commentary. Leandro Faria Lelo’s leading performance is almost too compelling for the material, and while an exploration of unrestrained sexuality in a gender-oppressive nation is indispensable, the result is more flaccid than a film this arousing should be. [⭐⭐⭐] —JAR