2010 City of Chicago Gay & Lesbian Hall of Fame musician, Scott Free, has been organizing the Alt Q Music Festival at the Old Town School of Folk Music for seven years. He has been producing the Homolatte queer music series for as long as Alt Q and has performed a wide variety of genres himself from his origins in dance music, rap, pop rock, and punk. Though it doesn't happen in a coffee shop as it was originally conceived, Homolatte is a fixture at Chicago's Big Chicks bar in the attached brunch restaurant space, Tweet. Many gay and straight neighbors are frequenters of the dollar burger night at the bar, which hosts one of the best Saturday night dance floors in the city.

CHICAGO - This weekend, Artist, curator, writer, filmmaker, and independent publisher, Billy Miller of Straight to Hell (a.k.a The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts) will be live narrating a selection of slides and films by male physique photographer and filmmaker Bob Mizer, publisher of Physique Pictorial (started in 1953), which introduced the work of George Quaintance and Tom of Finland. Mizer notably photographed the former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenneger and Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro. The two evenings of illustrated lectures are presented by White Light Cinema at The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.), featuring selected works from 1953-1992.Lectures start at 8pm, Saturday and Sunday, May 5 and 6. GOTR interviewed Miller by email.

Economist-turned-actor and filmmaker Patrick Wang—the director and star of the gay sleeper hit In the Family—couldn't be farther from convention. A conversation with a civil-rights attorney inspired Wang to write his first feature film about issues faced by unmarried gay partners.

As in countless detective and mystery stories, the driving force behind a blackmail scheme that results in multiple deaths and the ruin of a successful public figure is a photograph. What salacious image could cause this amount of destruction? (contains spoilers)

In this stand-up comedy act, Queer as Folk writer Del Shores roasts fellow actors and imitates his Southern Baptist Texan family, who inspired the many idiosyncratic characters that made his Sordid Lives movie and TV series such classics.

One might be able to tell from the multitude of naked men in his films, but experimental director Derek Jarman has been well-regarded as a portrayer of homosexual longing and its repression. In fact, it was still illegal to engage in any sexual activity with someone of the same sex until 1967, shortly before Jarman began his work. (contains spoilers)

Streams of glitter winking out from different sections of skin; confining corsets teased off; glaring sequined pasties over nipples as a lasting image. Emphasizing queer sexuality has become a significant part of the neo-burlesque tradition, and our city, with its rich history of speakeasies and live theater, offers several venues and a wide cast of performers with diverse backgrounds to carry that torch even further.

In 2004, renowned gay novelist Alan Hollinghurst published his fourth novel The Line of Beauty and won the esteemed Man Booker Prize for Fiction.  Two years later, likely influenced by Channel Four's huge success with its original miniseries Queer as Folk and its even more successful US Showtime remake, the BBC produced a three hour mini-series adaptation of Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2006) written by Andrew Davies and directed by Saul Dibb.  

Receiving my call one afternoon, Mark Deklin pulls over to the side of the road in his car to park. I commented that he was working on the fly, and he said that's LA for you. Deklin is the only male series regular on GCB (Good Christian Belles) and playing, Blake Reilly, the gay ex-husband of Cricket Caruth-Reilly in Dallas, TX. The new ABC series starring Kristin Chenoweth, formerly known as Good Christian Bitches, is based on the eponymous book by Kim Gatlin optioned by Darren Star (creator of the HBO series Sex and the City) who attached writer Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias, First Wives Club) to script the pilot. 

CHICAGO - Upwardly mobile, bear rapper Big Dipper is moving to New York City to join the ranks of gay icon Cazwell and explore the nightlife scene where he is sure to be seen. Native to the Chicago area, Big Dipper (yes like the constellation) feels he's done what he needed to do in the second city.

Welcome to the Go Over the Rainbow's queer comics column. As a website devoted to artistic criticism, we want to make sure no medium is marginalized and comics are no exception. Once a month, we will be presenting a brief note on a piece of comic art that should be of particular interest to the LGBTQIA community. We invite suggestions. If you have a favorite LGBT-themed comic, let us know!

Every country needs its coming out film. Jitters, by writer/director Baldvin Zophoníasson, is a solemn coming-of-age Icelandic drama played evenly by unknown actors and tells the bittersweet story of a teen gay boy Gabriel (Atli Oskar Fjalarsson) going through the rights of passage common to every generation, but specific to Millennials.

GOTR Editor-in-Chief, Sawyer J. Lahr, reviews, The Beat Hotel, the latest documentary from First Run Features, illustrating the burst of creativity in this seminal period following the obsenity charges against the publication of HOWL by gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg.