Context for future historians: the world is currently ON ONE. Things are looking pretty dark right now. But if there’s one theme for this week’s episode, it’s that we’ve been here before and we will fight again.
This week, Kris and Tara go hard. Kris talks about her moving experience supporting queer kids who were targeted by parents at their school. And watch out supporters of Friends, Pretty Woman and Batman (individually or all together, you know who you are), because Kris is coming in hot with some blistering takes on your formative cinema.
Tara details her trip from reading Jonathan Van Ness’s new book to digging into the queer history of her hometown and do you know what she finds? We’ve been here before. We’ll do it again. Despite the darkness and the erasure, these books, films, games, and everything that Kris and Tara recommend or talk about on this show are the result of queer lives coming to light. Queer isn’t new. It’s old as bones. None of us is alone.
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Transcript coming soon
Official Recommendations
Kris’s official recommendation for this week is the British coming-of-age romantic series, Heartstopper, which follows Charlie Spring, a gay schoolboy who falls in love with someone he sits next to in class, Nick Nelson. She (and so many other people) say it’s ADORABLE.
This week, Tara recommends the 2018 documentary Mapplethorpe, which tracks the Robert Mapplethorpe from his rise to fame in the 1970s to his untimely death in 1989. Mapplethorpe was a photographer best known for his black-and-white photographs and his controversial works that detailed the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 60s and early 70s.
Works/People Discussed
- Truth and Measure/Above All Things by Roslyn Sinclair
- All That Matters by Susan X Meagher
- While You Were Sleeping (1995)
- Luca (2021)
- Ambulance (2022)
- The State of Modern Action Films
- The Batman (2022)
- Love That Story: Observations from a Gorgeously Queer Life by Jonathan Van Ness
- Womontown | A Kansas City PBS Documentary