Count Me Out

Back in 1988, Julianne Moore won an Emmy for her roles as identical twins in the daytime CBS soap "As the World Turns" for the category of Outstanding Ingénue in A Drama Series. Six years later, she appeared bottomless in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) proving to the world that, in fact, her carpet matches her crimson curtains. Those two roles may be worlds apart. Yet, they not only show Moore’s range but also her foremost asset as an artist: she has a mean streak for taking risks. Other actresses are more beloved or more successful, but no other film performer has been willing to court failure as often as Moore, or be as much a hero to gay audiences and directors alike.

In June 1969, transgender and gay activists took to New York’s streets to protest unfair treatment and targeted harassment by police. In that same year, John Waters released his first film, Mondo Trasho, and, echoing the note struck by Stonewall, developed a compelling and much-needed new voice in independent film. Existing, as much of his early work did, before queer became an accepted, self-identifying term, it makes sense that his films might be categorized as gay cinema, but I would argue that a great deal of Waters’ work is distinctly queer cinema.

"I’m not a queer-filmmaker and if I were, maybe these themes would have been more political for me."

Be careful what you record, it might blow up virally. That's what happened to the infamous 1987 audio verité recording of domestic abuse between an alcoholic, embittered homophobe, "redneck" Raymond Huffman and his violent when drunk, loving when sober relationship with Peter Haskett who had a "bitchy queen thing going on" as Eddie Lee "Sausage" says. A noisy racket that kept Eddie "Lee Sausage" up all night, turned the surreptitious recordings by Eddie and his roommate Mitchell D. into an underground viral sensation pre-YouTube. Matthew Bate captures fans, comic illustrators, film producers, and animators ruminating about the nature of art, intellectual property, and our human tendency toward voyeurism.

As a fan of The Carol Burnett Show, the skit I remember most was "Mildred Fierce," a parody of the Joan Crawford noir potboiler, Mildred Pierce (1945). When I saw the film version of Mildred Pierce my first semester in college, I was floored by how little the Burnett sketch really made fun of the movie and that the overcooked criminal plot, outlandish costumes and even the sketch's preoccupation with how cooking grease symbolically separates the working-class Mildred from her pretentious, social climber daughter,Vita, are lifted from the original movie nearly intact. Consequently, Crawford's definitive vehicle has always felt to me like a long, dull episode of variety show television.