GLR May-June 2024

FILM

The Presence of Things Past

T HE 35th ANNUAL New York LGBTQ + Film Festival—better known as NEWFEST —ran from October 12th to 24th, 2023. Over 120 films were presented in the full gamut of genres in several venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, with national availability via streaming services. NEWFEST touts itself as the “largest presenter of LGBTQ + film & media and the largest convener of queer au diences in the city,” and who am I to doubt this claim? The menu was too large to taste more than a sampling, but to give you just a soupçon: Going to MARS: The Nikki Gio vanni Project , about the African American

Carthy and his henchman Roy Cohn. Timo thy Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) is a junior staffer in Senator McCarthy’s office and a practicing Catholic; he’s loyal to his boss out of a sense of duty. Hawk meets the younger Tim, correctly sizes him up as gay, and confidently as sumes his sexual prerogatives, informing Tim that from now on he’s “Skippy.” Dis cretion is the watchword in the paranoid at mosphere of the day. While both men remain closeted, Hawk’s seductive domi nation of the nice Catholic boy leaves little to the imagination. But temperamental dif ferences, and opposing political and moral values, eat away at their mutual desire and

A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

FELLOW TRAVELERS Mul ti ple directors Created by Ron Nyswaner LIEWITHME Directed by Olivier Peyon TDSProduc ti ons, Canal+, Ciné+ NYAD Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin Ne tf lix Originals

poet, writer, and activist; and Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes , a rich accounting of the glamorous 20th-cen tury gay photographer’s marvelously theatrical images in velvety black and white. The shorts covered an array of issues, some po etically, like “The Dalles,” others comedically, such as “EITR,” a little gem about a modern American Muslim selling scents in the family store while eyeing any man coming through the door,

shaky sense of trust. Hawk marries Senator Smith’s conven tional daughter, the attractive Lucy Smith, at which point the rebuffed Tim enlists in the armed services. A similarly mis matched couple offers an intriguing counterpoint. An African American newspaper reporter working the Capitol beat, Marcus Gaines, a manly closet case, falls for a black drag performer, Frankie Hines. Succumbing to the brash and overt Frankie chal

and while keeping his fashionable mother at bay, especially her customary desire to fix him up with just the right girl. Here, then, are some

thoughts on a mere three of the feature films or miniseries that were on offer. All three have re ceived considerable atten tion, much of it favorable, and all are readily avail able on the small screen (though Lie withMe and Nyad were first released in theaters). Finally, all three use flashbacks and flash-forwards to juxtapose two periods in the characters’ lives, possibly with an “All is vanity!” subtext. T HE EIGHT - EPISODE MINISERIES Fellow Travelers written by TV and movie writer Ron Nyswaner ( Philadelphia , episodes of Ray Donovan and Homeland ), examines the attraction between two men employed by powerful U.S. senators during the 1950s Red Scare. Hawkins Fuller (“Hawk”), played by Matt Bomer, is a highly placed staffer for Senator Wesley Smith, a principled op ponent of anti-Communist demagogues like Senator Joe Mc Allen Ellenzweig is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye.

Left: Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in Fellow Travelers . Right: Victor Belmondo and Jérémy Gillet in LiewithMe .

lenges Marcus’ masculine Black identity. The eight episodes track Hawk and Tim and Hawk’s mar riage to Lucy, cutting to flash-forwards set in the 1980s, in San Francisco, where Hawk has tracked down Tim, who is dying of AIDS. (No spoiler alert: we learn this early on in the se ries.) The series tracks the intersecting paths of the two men through the intervening decades. Individual episodes examine the deceptions and lies of the closet and the ethical compro mises that ruin friendships, scar marriages, and damage sons and daughters. Bomer gives a strong rendering of a deeply compromised man, while Jonathan Bailey (of Bridgerton fame), his handsomeness disguised behind large glasses, wears

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