In love with a man who lived in East Berlin, the film was intended as a way to get him out of the country. Speck’s Westler (1985) is rooted in the director’s own life.
“It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives” (Rosa von Praunheim) The film suggests a bridge between ‘70s Derek Jarman, John Waters, and New Queer Cinema, if Waters had any impulse in joining ACT UP. Looking back on it now, it’s a document of its time, but limited by that too: one can easily forgive its factual mistakes about HIV transmission, but its casual racism and hostility towards women hamper its politics. Praunheim fought desperately against this possibility. The film juggles several narrative lines, including an editor who spreads misinformation in her tabloid paper and a woman who fetishizes sex with gay men, ending up in a dystopian 1987, where 70% of German prisoners are HIV-positive and the government has made HIV tests mandatory. The aggressively tilted camera angles set the stage for an overriding mood of activist camp, with recurring appearances by a drag quintet. Collectively written, it stars the director as a bathhouse owner who profits from allowing his gay customers to have unsafe sex while struggling with AIDS and his own homophobia. Praunheim recognized the danger stemming both from the virus itself and the resurgence in homophobia it led to, envisioning a near-future version of a leper colony. Nothing starts from scratch.” “Queer Kino” included Praunheim’s A Virus Knows No Morals (1986), a radical dark comedy responding to the AIDS crisis as soon as it hit Germany. Rosa von Praunheim’s confrontational It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971) has been credited with inspiring the German gay liberation movement, although Speck describes this milestone as “already straining at the leash. Bressan’s Buddies, which hit Germany in its year of completion.” Speck describes the attitude among German gay men at the time it was made: “every possible STD was ridiculed as the invincibility of the gay psyche made its first appearance in history.” He adds: “ This high time was met hard by the ‘gay cancer’ which made its way into the consciousness of German society in about 1986 - an awareness spearheaded by Arthur J.
It was a victim of tragic bad timing: its celebration of the liberating potential of casual sex, including encounters in public restrooms, was instantly dated by the onset of AIDS.
#Great vintage gay movies series#
Fassbinder films were included ( Fox and His Friends and Querelle ), as well as other well-known directors like Ulrike Ottinger and Monika Treut, the meat of the series relies on lesser-known work that shone a light on aspects of German life that have since disappeared.įrank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (1980) was well-received upon its American release in ‘81, but it’s rarely revived now. Its programmer, filmmaker Wieland Speck, says that “questioning our parents’ generation, the war generation, had a strong impact on the developing gay movement, especially the first feminist cineastes.” While it’s inevitable that two R.W. The Quad’s June series “Queer Kino” commemorated this by showing German films from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Perhaps as a result, the movement was far queerer than any precursor, apart from the ‘60s American avant-garde. The rise of New German Cinema coincided with the birth of gay liberation.