Music

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.

Patrick Gill, co-founder of In Our Own Words Blog, pays tribute to "Ma" Rainey and Gladys Bentley, two queer black women of Blues music history. 

CHICAGO - Director Tristan Patterson's debut documentary, Dragonslayer, may be the millennial generation's Dogtown and Z Boys. It was produced by renown lesbian producer, Christine Vachon (Boys Don't Cry), the force behind The New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, countless queer films and filmmakers, most recently the Gold Globe Award-winning HBO series Mildred Piercedirected by out filmmaker Todd Haynes. Patterson's screenplay Superstar 81 was also optioned by Christine Vachon for Killer Films. He is attached to direct attached to direct his own screenplay Electric Slide starring Ewan McGregor for Myriad Pictures. GOTR Editor-in-Chief met the staff of Drag City - the record label distributing Dragonslayer in association with Killer Films - during the premiere party at Rodan in Chicago's Wicker Park last week.

The second part of Jon Bastion's narrative biography of Cole Porter through his many subversive lyrics.

The book Music on Film: Grease is an homage to everything Grease: The original 1971 play, the 1978 movie, the sequel Grease 2, the TV documentary Behind the Music, the 1994 and 2007 New York revivals, more TV specials, the 2010 sing-along version of the original movie, the promotional John Travolta posters given away with purchase of Helene Curtis shampoo, Grease jeans, Grease jackets, Grease Firestone tires, and Pepsi’s Grease “lucky caps”.

Last June 9th marked the 120th anniversary of composer Cole Porter's birth, the only child of a well-off family in Indiana. His father was a pharmacist; his mother the daughter of "the richest man in Indiana." Porter would be twenty-three when war broke out in Europe and twenty-six when the US finally entered it. He did move to Paris in 1917, and there are stories of him serving with the French Foreign Legion or teaching at the French Officers School, but, according to biographer Stephen Citron in "Noel & Cole: the Sophisticates", there is no documentary evidence to back up this military experience. In 1919, Porter married Linda Lee Thomas, a divorced woman of high society eight years his senior and, according to Citron "(Porter had) frequent homosexual encounters" of which she was aware. The couple's global travels and Porter's sexual prowess were the inspiration for many of his most popular American songs of the 1930s.