A transgender YENTL?

I just read this article in the most recent issue of The Advocate, titled "Not Your Bubbe's Yentl: A story made famous by Barbra Streisand gets a queer 21st-century retelling."  Jill Sobule, the queer singer-songwriter of the 1995 hit "I Kissed a Girl," has written an updated stage musical of Yentl.  The article states: "Sobule's Yentl story is about a transgender boy's coming-of-age rather than a straight girl's secret." 

Interestingly, at the end of "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story on which Yentl is based, Yentl moves to America at the end to continue living as a man.  Food for thought...


Full article

Some links to websites about transgender film, and venues of transgender film spectatorship:

For anybody interested in exploring transgender film in your final project (or just in general), I thought I'd include some links to help your exploration.

Hazel Freeman's International Transgender Film Guide

Jaye Kaye's Transgender Movie Guide (This website is now defunct, but it's a comprehensive list of films from pre-1960 to 2010).

The Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival

Translations: The Seattle Transgender Film Festival

SFTFF: San Francisco Transgender Film Festival

Here are YouTube clips to some seminal Judy Garland performances.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow, from the film The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The Man That Got Away, from the film A Star is Born (1956)

The Trolley Song, from the film Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)

I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, from the film Ziegfeld Girl

You Made Me Love You, in the film Broadway Melody (1938)

I Could Go On Singing, from the film of the same name (1963)

Get Happy, from the film Summer Stock (1950)

Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again, duet with Barbra Streisand on The Judy Garland Show

Trailer for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Judy Garland's scenes in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Trailer for I Could Go On Singing (1963)

Fan videos about Judy Garland:

"Judy's Groceries" (Judy and Liza Minnelli go to the supermarket)

"Judy's Cream of Wheat" (Judy makes breakfast)

"Wizard of Oz alternate ending" on Mad TV

If you liked CRUISING, you'll love...

This is really something. The trailer for Boy Toys (2007), a scene for scene remake of Cruising starring Ken dolls (in the tradition of Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story). The whole thing is available on YouTube. We'll be watching clips from it during our "New Media" unit.
Boy Toys trailer

THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE and THE BOYS IN THE BAND AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE!

The Killing of Sister George (1968, Robert Aldrich) and The Boys in the Band (1970, William Friedkin) are now available, in their entirety, on YouTube! Vito Russo discusses these films in the excerpt from The Celluloid Closet that you're reading this week. Don't miss the opportunity to see these films. Love them or hate them, they are essential LGBTQ cinema.

The Boys in the Band, one of the first (if not the first) LGBTQ films to be protested by activists, was directed by William Friedkin, who also directed Cruising (1980). Click on the links to watch the films. I'd be showing them in our course, if only there was more time!

The Killing of Sister George (1968, Robert Aldrich)

The Boys in the Band (1970, William Friedkin)

Gawker.com discusses "the gay classics."

Wow, LGBTQ film history (or, at least, gay male film history...), is everywhere today! And there's a lot of concern about whether past LGBTQ pop culture is still relevant. Here's this article from Gawker about The Boys in the Band, a fascinating film from 1970 that we, unfortunately, won't get to watch in its entirety. But you can write about it in your final paper!

http://gawker.com/5899549/lets-discuss-the-gay-classics

So what do you think? Are Judy Garland, old LGBTQ movies, and a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about in class still relevant? Why or why not?

Do gay men still need Judy Garland?

An interesting New York Times article about whether or not Judy Garland, Vito's favorite diva, remains culturally important for gay men:

The Road Gets Rougher for Judyism's Faithful

(Of course, not surprisingly, the article fails to mention that Judy has also historically been highly relevant to some lesbian audiences. See the chapter: "'My Beautiful Wickedness': The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy" in Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty).

Propaganda films for women from the 1940s and 1950s

During World War II, many women went to work to fill the roles left empty by men who went to war (as Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis point out in their great book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, the increase in working women contributed to thriving lesbian communities during this time period, as women found themselves and each other). Vito Russo points out that one of the reasons that Hollywood movies in the 1950s made independent women characters in films "scary, evil lesbians" was to encourage women to return to to their "correct sphere" in the home (think about Donna Reed and Betty Draper). Click on Rosie the Riveter for a propaganda video encouraging women to go to work in the 1940s:

Click on the Pepsi ad for a Pepsi commercial from 1957 illustrating a "modern woman's" proper place in the mainstream imagination:

Anti-homosexual propaganda films from the 1950s

BOYS BEWARE (1953)

HOMOSEXUALS: THE TERRIBLE TRUTH (date unknown)

GLEN OR GLENDA (1953, Ed Wood)

Watch GLEN OR GLENDA in its entirety online! Click on the poster.

Coming soon to LGBTS-187: QUEENS AT HEART and Mark Quigley

This Thursday, Mark Quigley, Manager of The UCLA Film & Television Archive's Research and Study Center, will be coming to class to speak with us about the many LGBT media-related resources available to scholars at UCLA.

In particular, he'll talk about the archive's enormous Outfest Collection, which includes every film that Outfest (L.A.'s long-running LGBTQ film festival) has shown, among other materials. He'll also be showing QUEENS AT HEART, an extremely rare short documentary about drag culture in New York from 1965 (it will serve as an interesting representation of the period in which Vito moved to New York, and is also a useful precursor to Cruising and Paris is Burning, which both deal with LGBTQ subcultures in New York). It was recently restored by The UCLA Film & Television Archive's Outfest Legacy Project, a fantastic project dedicated to preserving LGBTQ films.

Mark sent over this poster of SHE MAN, which played on a double bill with QUEENS OF HEART. Unfortunately, we don't have SHE MAN in the archive. But if you want it, believe it or not, you can buy it here.


Trailer for QUEENS AT HEART

"A Position of Faith" (1972)

Vito Russo saw this documentary, A Position of Faith (1972), and fell in love with its star: the first openly gay person in history to be ordained to the Christian ministry. He added clips from the film to his Celluloid Closet lecture, and the two became lovers for a time.

"A Position of Faith," Part I
"A Position of Faith," Part II

Rhoda dates Phyllis' gay brother on THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW

Vito interviewed Valerie Harper for The Advocate partly because he was so delighted with her performance in this episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, "My Brother's Keeper." Michael Schiavi writes that "This was exactly the kind of nonchalant visibility he was fighting to obtain for gays and lesbians." (P. 147)

To see "the longest laugh in the history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show," fast forward to Part II, 9:30 (the whole episode is classic!)

The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "My Brother's Keeper," Part I
The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "My Brother's Keeper," Part II
The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song

Performances by some of Vito's favorite New York cabaret singers of the early 1970s (click on the pics):

Laura Kenyon

Alaina Reed
Baby Jane Dexter

Here is a link to a pretty comprehensive list of films that appeared in The Celluloid Closet, along with links to their pages on IMDB (in case you forgot to write any down...)

Films that appear in The Celluloid Closet

Trailers for films that Vito showed as part of his early lecture series:

Vito screened clips of these films in his early "Celluloid Closet" presentation to illustrate "The Gay Guilt Syndrome" and "Blackmail" subtopics of his lecture (Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist, p. 134). Click on the posters below to watch the trailers:


Vito tried to "offer some hope at the close of his presentation" with "Breakthrough" clips of these films:

"The Homosexuals": A CBS documentary from 1967

Vito Russo discussed this documentary, which originally appeared on CBS in 1967, in his first "Celluloid Closet" lectures:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFSCPTZLxGs



Summary taken from YouTube user TheLoverofMovies:
"The Homosexuals" is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station out of San Francisco.[1]

Three years in the making, "The Homosexuals" went through two producers and multiple revisions. The episode included interviews with several gay men, psychiatrists, legal experts and cultural critics, interspersed with footage of a gay bar and a police sex sting. "The Homosexuals" garnered mixed critical response. The network received praise from some quarters and criticism from others for even airing the program.

Read about it here: http://www.filmthreat.com/features/1122/