Friday, January 27, 2017

Armie Hammer’s New Gay Film Keeps Its Controversial Sex Scene

"The book is a love story," says star Timothée Chalamet, "and it happens to have those detailed scenes."
From: NewNowNext

 Ever since it was announced Luca Guadagnino was adapting Call Me By Your Name for the big screen, fans of the original 2007 novel by André Aciman were dying to know if the film would keep the book’s most erotic passage: The one in which 17-year-old Elio lies on his bed masturbating with a cut-open peach before 24-year-old tutor, Oliver, visits his room, tastes the peach, and has sex with his young friend.

Well, after Call Me By Your Name’s premiere at Sundance this week, the word is out: The peach scene is in.


 “Imagine the infamous American Pie scene, but with dignity, emotional truth, and a semblance of relatability” writes The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon. “But, you know, a guy still fucks a fruit.”

Timothée Chalamet, who plays Elio, told Variety he wasn’t concerned about the film’s sexual content.

“I felt very safe in Luca’s hands and Armie’s hands,” said the 21-year-old actor. “The book is a love story, and it happens to have those detailed scenes.” He added that he and Hammer had a good chemistry off-screen as well.

“I haven’t had a friendship like that with someone that I’d worked with [before]. This wasn’t the plan, but we became such good friends that it made the chemistry onscreen palpable. because we really did like each other in real life.”


 Of course some are already complaining the sex scenes don’t go far enough: “The relative discretion about the full physical compatibility of the men could potentially help the film gain a wider audience beyond the LGBTQ community,” writes The Hollywood Reporter, “but feels a little too restrained for who these characters have become by the time they consummate their relationship.”

Fans of the film maintain that what it lacks in nudity, it makes up for in sensuality: Guadagnino had his two stars locking lips fairly early in rehearsals.

“The next thing we know, we’re lying in the grass and making out,” Hammer told Variety. “The shooting of the first kiss scene was great. It felt as organic and special as every shot we did on this movie.”


The film, picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, is getting rave reviews—and received an extended standing ovation in Park City.

And while the queer component of the story can’t be ignored, Hammer hopes audiences “[have] evolved enough that now we can see past that and see the humanity, the truth, that is present in every moment of desire or affection.”

Call Me By Your Name hits theaters later this year.

Another Year, Another Fabulous Actress & Gay Icon Snubbed By The Oscars

From: Queerty
Octavia Spencer received a well-deserved 2017 Academy Awards nomination for Best Supporting Actress, thanks to her excellent performance in Hidden Figures, as NASA computer genius Dorothy Vaughan. But all the hype surrounding Spencer overshadowed another actress who shared time with her on the big screen: Kirsten Dunst (above) as NASA supervisor (and Vaughan’s racist adversary) Vivian Mitchell.

Although she did not receive the critical accolades of her fellow cast members, Dunst certainly deserves praise for a performance that was deliciously nuanced, effortlessly hateful and unfortunately realistic portrayal of how someone could be so hateful yet still human. Playing a passive-aggressive racist could have easily fallen by the wayside into the waters of caricature, but Dunst tossed insults over her shoulder as she walked out of the room, the effect lingering long after she was out of the scene. RuPaul would applaud Vivian’s shade, if the character wasn’t being a bigot of course.

This isn’t the first time Dunst has delivered brilliant work; Melancholia, The Virgin Suicides–even way back to when she was just 11 years old in Interview With The Vampire–she enriches her roles beyond the words in the scripts, the mark of a great actor. Her role in camp classic Drop Dead Gorgeous, and then later as the star of Bring It On, elevated her to superstar status amongst the gays, who may sometimes forget how good she is as a dramatic actor. But she has never been nominated for an Oscar (although she did earn a Golden Globe nomination for Interview With The Vampire).

Dunst isn’t the first gay icon to be ignored by the Oscars committee.

Let's takes a look back at some of the most famous, perhaps infamous, occasions when actresses beloved by the LGBTQ community were snubbed by the Oscars…

John Hurt, Oscar-Nominated Star of ‘The Elephant Man,’ Dies at 77

From: Variety
 John Hurt, the wiry English actor who played a drug addict in “Midnight Express,” Kane in “Alien,” the title character in “The Elephant Man,” and Winston Smith in “1984” has died, his publicist confirmed to Variety. He was 77.

Hurt had disclosed in 2015 that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Mel Brooks, executive producer of “The Elephant Man,” tweeted that he was a “truly magnificent talent.

He played Mr. Ollivander, the wand-maker in the first Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone,” and for parts 1 and 2 of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” however his scenes in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” were cut.

Hurt was twice nominated for Oscars, the first time in 1979 for his supporting role in “Midnight Express,” the second time in 1981 for “The Elephant Man.” In 2012 he received a BAFTA Award for outstanding British contribution to cinema.

The actor had the pale, haunted look of a man who is perpetually sleep deprived, but he used his craggy features to his advantage. Reviewing the 2011 feature adaptation of John le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” in which Hurt played Control, the head of MI6, the New York Times revealed admiration for the actor’s visage: Control “explains his theory about the mole, the folds in Mr. Hurt’s magnificent face sagging a bit lower. That face, a crevassed landscape that suggests sorrow and history, has the granitic grandeur of W.H. Auden in his later life. In tandem with Mr. Hurt’s sonorously melancholic voice (and its useful undertones of hysteria), it is a face that, when used by a filmmaker like Mr. Alfredson, speaks volumes about a character who would otherwise take reams of written dialogue to discover.”

But, of course, there was more to Hurt than his memorable appearance; Michael Caton-Jones, who directed the actor in several films, described him to the U.K.’s the Guardian in 2006 in this way: “One of the greatest screen actors ever, and one of the bravest — because he’s all about honest emotion. People think actors have to pretend or lie. The best actors, like John, know they have to search for the truth.”



In addition to “Alien,” Hurt appeared in a number of other high-profile fantasy or science fiction films, including “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (in which he played Jones’ aged and, for much of the movie, befuddled colleague Dr. Oxley), “V for Vendetta,” “Hellboy,” and Brett Ratner’s 2014 Dwayne Johnson-starrer “Hercules.” He also did a three-episode arc on the BBC’s “Doctor Who” in 2013.

Hurt also appeared in Bong Joon-ho’s genre-bending 2013 science fiction film “Snowpiercer,” as a sort of an eminence grise to the rebels aboard the train that endlessly circles the snowscapes of a post-apocalyptic Earth.

He most recently played a priest opposite Natalie Portman in Pablo Larraín’s 2016 biographical drama “Jackie.”

Hurt was slowly building his career in the film and TV career in the 1960s and ’70s. He was first recognized for a supporting role as a young schemer in the classic film “A Man for All Seasons” in 1966, and he played a man unfairly accused of murder in 1971’s “10 Rillington Place,” drawing his first BAFTA nomination. In 1975 he significantly upped his profile by starring in the adaptation of “The Naked Civil Servant,” Quentin Crisp’s memoir about living openly as a gay man in England in the 1930s and ’40s, winning the actor his first BAFTA TV Award. (Decades later, Hurt would reprise the role of Crisp in 2009’s “An Englishman in New York,” about the writer’s later years living in Manhattan, and drew another BAFTA TV nomination.)

Also fueling Hurt’s rise was a frighteningly effective turn as the blood-and-sex-crazed Roman emperor Caligula in “I, Claudius,” which aired on PBS in 1977. The sunken-cheeked actor memorably played a drug addict who befriends the central character in a Turkish prison in “Midnight Express,” drawing an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA win, and he provided the moving lead voice of Hazel for the animated feature version of “Watership Down,” both in 1978.

The actor actually had a fairly small role in Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” but the film’s exceptional success at the box office coupled with the spectacular way in which his character dies in the film — with the alien shockingly bursting from his chest — guaranteed Hurt a level of visibility he had never achieved before. Hurt, who drew yet another BAFTA nomination for the role, was 39 at the time but looked older.

The very next year he starred as the title character, John Merrick, in David Lynch’s film “The Elephant Man,” and though his features were hidden behind either a canvas bag or the mounds of makeup used to convey Merrick’s disfigurement, Hurt brought a nobility and dignity — and undeniable sense of tragedy — to the character. The New York Times said, “It’s to the credit of Christopher Tucker’s makeup and to Mr. Hurt’s extraordinary performance deep inside it, that John Merrick doesn’t look absurd, like something out of a low-budget science-fiction film.” He was nominated for an Oscar and won another BAFTA.

Also in 1980 he had a substantial role in Michael Cimino’s controversial film “Heaven’s Gate,”co-starring with Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. He also starred as Raskolnikov in a BBC miniseries production of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and “Punishment” that aired on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” that year.

As his career was on the rise in the early 1980s, Hurt took a substantial emotional hit when his girlfriend of 16 years, French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, was killed in a riding accident in 1983.

The actor turned in an impressive, sympathetic performance as Winston Smith in Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The same year he starred as a mostly silent killer in Stephen Frears’ philosophical road movie-cum-crime drama “The Hit.”

In 1989’s “Scandal,” Hurt starred as the real-life Stephen Ward, who groomed young women for sexual relationships with Britain’s powerful as a means of gaining access to them, resulting, inevitably in a scandal. Roger Ebert said: “The movie stars John Hurt in one of the best performances of his career. In an early scene, Hurt’s eyes light up as he sees a pretty girl walking down the street, and somehow Hurt is able to make us understand that he feels, not lust, but simply a deep and genuine appreciation for how wonderful a pretty girl can look on a fine spring day.”

In Jim Sheridan’s “The Field” (1990), in which Richard Harris brilliantly played an Irish tenant farmer beset by tragedy, Hurt gave an equally impressive performance as his dimwitted friend, winning another BAFTA nomination.

The actor played a Scottish aristocrat central to the plot in the 1995 historical adventure “Rob Roy.”

Hurt gave one of his most intriguing, charming performances in the 1998 film “Love and Death in Long Island,” in which he played a writer who becomes absolutely besotted with a young actor, played by Jason Priestley, whom he accidentally sees in a silly movie.

Hurt was part of the impressive ensemble cast of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film “Melancholia,” and the same year he played Control, the leader of MI6, in the feature adaptation of John le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

John Vincent Hurt was born in Shirebrook, Derbyshire. He trained to become a painter at Grimsby Art School (and continued painting throughout his life), then studied at RADA — the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

The actor racked up a significant number of stage credits, including as Romeo in a 1973 production of “Romeo and Juliet,” and toured in Beckett’s solo show “Krapp’s” but truly found his place onscreen.

With his extraordinary whiskey-tinged voice — the U.K.’s the Guardian wrote in 2009, “His face is one of the most distinctive in the movies. Almost as distinctive as his voice, dripping with honey and acid, often at the same time” — Hurt was unsurprisingly in demand for voiceover and narration work. He was the voice of the dragon in the BBC-Syfy series “Merlin” and narrated films including the Western “Wild Bill,” “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” and von Trier’s “Dogville” and “Manderlay,” as well as a variety of documentaries.

In 2009 Hurt won a prestigious BFI Fellowship from the British Film Institute.

He was married four times, the first time to actress Annette Robertson in the early 1960s, the second time to Donna Peacock, the third time to Jo Dalton.

Survivors include the actor’s fourth wife, producer Anwen Rees-Myers, whom Hurt married in 2005, and two children by Dalton.

Advice In A Post-Trump World: Have Sex. Have Lots And Lots Of Queer Sex.

From: Queerty
A lot of our friends are suffering insomnia right now. So are we. Perhaps, in the back of our minds, we’re trying to hammer out exactly what to do with ourselves; how to actively exist, live, and create day-to-day in a post-Trump world.

It’s something we’ll have to figure out every morning for the next four years, as we wade through that hour’s fresh cesspool of “alternative truths” and misdirecting tweets. That’s not the morning most of us want to wake up to everyday, but here we are.

Well, not a moment too soon, here’s a reassuring pep talk from LGBTQ historian Tim McCarthy, who, in an interview with Davey Wavey, tells us exactly what we should all be doing with ourselves:

Have sex. Have lots and lots and lots of sex. Sex has always been a revolutionary act, especially queer sex. It both honors the protest that’s required to stand up to the world around us, but it also honors and validates who we are. So, number one, if that’s all you can do, you’re still doing a great thing, okay?
Okay, we’ll get on that.

The interview — which covers an unbelievable amount of ground in two minutes — should be seen in its entirely, so here it is:


ActiveDuty's Wyatt Rubs One Out

This handsome soldier dropped by and we thought it would be great to see how he pleasures himself.
From: Rough Straight Men





ABC Bumps LGBTQ Rights Miniseries “When We Rise” To Cover More Trump

From: Queerty
President Donald Trump trumps LGBTQ rights when it comes to prime-time on ABC. The network announced that because House Speaker Paul Ryan has invited the president to deliver his first address to Congress on February 28th, it will shift its scheduled miniseries, “When We Rise,” so it can instead televise the speech that will be seen on every other network.

The miniseries, depicting the decades-long struggle by a group of LGBTQ Americans for equality, debuts on Monday, February 27 at 9 p.m. EST, 8 p.m. Central. Instead of presenting the second night of “When We Rise” on Tuesday, ABC will interrupt its lineup to join CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, the Spanish language networks and countless radio stations and webstreams to bring Trump’s address live to its viewers.

“When We Rise” was created by Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and stars Guy Pearce, Mary-Louise Parker, Rachel Griffiths, Michael K. Williams, Rosie O’Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg and trans actresses Alexandra Grey and Ivory Aquino.

Prior to ABC’s scheduling change, Black said during a press event that he thinks Trump might find his series worth watching.

“If Donald Trump actually watches the show, he might like the show,” Black said, adding that Trump voters may get a lot out of it, too. And as Variety reported, thanks to ABC, now they won’t have to miss any of it.

“I don’t see this show as trying to speak to only half of the country — I didn’t write the show for half the country.” Black said he wrote it with his own kind in mind: a Christian, Southern, military family.

Watch the trailer for “When We Rise” below:


48 GUYS YOU MIGHT POSSIBLY WANT TO FUCK

From: Manhunt Daily
Easton, Maryland

Normalcy is nice

I don't have a list of a thousand criteria you have to meet - you just be a decent person - close to my age and attractive... Anyone have off today? The decent person thing is HUGE.

36 Fetishes Every Gay Man Should Know

From: The Advocate
11. 
Duct Tape

Remember how rope is a commonly fetishized bondage material? Duct tape is a close second.

For guys who enjoy getting gagged, duct tape is a staple. Duct tape calls to mind kidnap fantasies and dark hallways, and nothing beats that hot, muffled gagging sound. Note: as sexy as duct tape is, at some point you will have to pull it off, which will hurt. This writer suggests using vet wrap as a nice alternative. 

50 BODIES THAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE BANGIN’: AN INTERACTIVE TREASURE HUNT FOR FACE PICS


From: Manhunt Daily
Hillcrest (San Diego), California, USA
just here to look
just hanging out and here to cha

36 Olympians Who Definitely Look Better Than You in Speedos and Spandex

From: Esquire
13.
Mark Hunter
 and 
Zac Purchase​​
Great Britain

At the London 2012 Olympics.

30 Kinky Terms Every Gay Man Needs to Know

From: The Advocate
14
E-Stimulation/Electrical Play

E-Stim involves using electrodes and electric shock during BDSM play. This is another kink that is not for beginners. Professionally made electrical units have to be used.

27 Things To Look Forward To In 2017

From: NewNowNext
16
 More Great Gay Lit

Rahul Mehta, author of the prize-winning collection Quarantine, has written his debut novel, No Other World, a compelling coming-of-age story about a gay Indian boy finding his place in his immigrant family—and his adopted homeland.


 Patricia A Smith’s The Year of Needy Girls , meanwhile, sees Dierdre and Sara Jane’s new life as an out couple threatened by the murder of a 10-year-old and accusations of sexual molestation.

In the nonfiction arena, there’s new memoirs in the new year from Armistead Maupin and Roxane Gay.


 In Logical Family, Maupin shares how he evolved from the conservative son of the Old South to an out-and-proud novelist who impacted millions with his Tales of the City books, with pit stops in Vietnam, gay bathhouses, the White House, and beyond.



With Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay speaks frankly about self-image, food, eating issues and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe,” she writes. “I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere.”

Also hitting the shelves: Bernadino Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman, Dawn Lundy Martin’s Good Stock, Strange Blood, and Lonely Christopher’s The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, from Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series.

Cher! 23 Times The Dark Lady Wasn’t At A Loss For Words

From: NewNowNext
[During her Vegas show] “I’m standing backstage frightened out of my mind saying, ’I can’t do this.’ Then my choreographer tells me, ’If God didn’t want you to do this, he wouldn’t have looked down on your cradle and said,’SEQUINS.'”

The 23 Hottest Guys On “Game Of Thrones,” Ranked

From: NewNowNext
3
Robb Stark

Another popular character taken too soon, Robb (Richard Madden) saw murdered during the Red Wedding, after watching his pregnant wife get killed in front of him.

They probably should have just sent a gift.

10 Protest Movies That Inspire Change In These Scary Times

From: Queerty
7. 
Norma Rae

LGBT rights advocate Sally Field took home her first Academy Award for Norma Rae, a film about formation of a textile union. With a demagogic kleptocrat has to takn up residence in the White House (when he actually feels like doing his job, anyway) Norma Rae resonates louder than ever with the American working class. The film revolves around the poor working conditions and pitiful wages for textile workers in the 1970’s south. In a “freelance economy,” trade unions have lost some of their political clout. Norma Rae reminds us all that if a woman could organize a union against all odds 40 years ago, even the most seemingly insignificant folk could do it again today.

7 Queer Films That Should Have Been Nominated For An Oscar This Year

From: NewNowNext
4
Best Animated Short
“The Saint of Dry Creek”

Picture a 1950s farmer calling out his son for being gay, and you probably don’t imagine it being a very loving conversation. But what if that wasn’t the case?

Storycorps animated Patrick Haggerty’s story of growing up the son of a dairy farmer in rural Washington state. As a teen, Haggerty began to realize he was gay, and worked studiously to hide any traces of it. But one day, after performing at a school assembly, he learned that his father could see him much more clearly than he realized.

Two Gay Men in Ivory Coast Still Seek Explanation for their Imprisonment

From: Towleroad
Two Ivorian men who were arrested in October and released from prison this week remain unclear as to their offense. While it is presumed that a public indecency law was used to inculpate both openly gay men, they deny any improper behavior or even sexual involvement with each other.

Ivory Coast does not outlaw same-sex relations, unlike some other African nations such as neighboring Nigeria, and typically has held a reputation for tolerance towards its LGBT community. However, there are troubling signs that this may be changing, especially following the recent abuse of men who were inadvertently outed by the American embassy in Abidjan after being photographed signing a condolence book following the Orlando Pulse massacre. Previously in 2014, the country’s largest LGBT organization was targeted and its headquarters attacked by a large mob.

Yann, 31, and Abdoul, 19, were each initially detained in their southwestern village and then convicted with three-month sentences in November at a hearing in the coastal town of Sassandra. At the time, officials refused to comment on the specifics of the case, claiming that everything was already public record.  That refusal has continued even after the men’s release:

Though prosecutors have declined to confirm the charge against them, activists say if the indecency law was used it would be the first known instance of the provision being used to jail gay people in the country.
Graeme Reid, director of the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch, said: “A vague law, arbitrary arrests and an unexplained conviction: this is completely contrary to the rule of law. The government needs to come clean and offer an explanation to these two young men who have spent three months in jail for no apparent reason.”
“We were convicted in an unjust manner,” [said Yann.] “If there is no law that that condemns it, I don’t understand how we could have been convicted.”

Both men, without access to legal aid or LGBT resources given the remoteness of their locale, did not appeal their sentence in order to avoid prolonging the process. Now they plan to relocate to Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, in order to start over and hopefully elude further harassment by authorities. But their unfortunate case serves as a warning to Ivorian LGBT activists, as well as their allies abroad, to step up their efforts.

He’s Naked: ‘Misfits’ & ‘Fortitude’ Actor Robert Sheehan

From: OMG
 You might remember Robert Sheehan as the annoying kid from MISFITS. We’ll he’s all grown up now and appears in Fortitude.Check him out!