On Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour (1994) — Tsai Ming-liang’s movies bring to mind the semi-lucid state of waking up in the middle of the night, or the last few moments of consciousness before you fall asleep. There’s a dreaminess to them. Languid, maybe. Plot isn’t important. Dialogue is minimal. …

(A recent read-a-thon of five queer contemporary YA novels showed me what’s been done to death in the genre and what there should be more of.) My reading habits go through cycles. There are weeks when I’ll read nothing but feminist science fiction, or history books about the U.S. in…

K.M. Szpara’s Docile is a good novel about consent and a bad novel about capitalism. Docile’s tagline is “There is no consent under capitalism.” …

I fear this comparison I’m about to make between two gay romance narratives will perpetuate queer people being too overly critical of their own community. So let’s just make this clear now: I’m about to talk about two lovely stories. My placing one against the other is purely due to…

About half of Greyson Chance’s album portraits is actually great and the other half is an awkward mess of him trying really hard to sound like someone who didn’t rise to fame from a Lady Gaga cover when he was a tween. The album cover already puts him at a…

American media in the early 1990s was a bit strange. The bizarre small town detective show Twin Peaks garnered mainstream praise throughout the country. Bret Easton Ellis’s transgressive novel about a yuppie cannibal rapist serial killer American Psycho reached widespread controversy and acclaim. Things weren’t following the wholesome, no-nonsense precepts…

Martin Ritt’s Hombre is a 1974 countercultural western starring Paul Newman as the hombre in question. It’s an amazing example of a phenomenon I’ve written about before: Media doing cartwheels to keep racist tropes alive, but in a more palatable way. …