queer: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Season two of Euston Films’ BBC Three horror comedy Wreck is in development prior to the first airing, as creator Ryan J. Brown opens up about portraying queer identity and a scarcity of British slasher.

Halloween is upon us, which means we’re all looking for some spooky season movies to help get into the spirit. For this reason Shudder’s upcoming documentary series, Queer For Fear: The History Of Queer Horror, could not arrive at a better time. Queer For Fear is filled with interviews & historical information about the queer underpinnings of the finest horror cinema the world has ever known. Although I was aware of the connections between horror & the LGBTQI community I had never explored those connections deeply.

Near to her heart. Maren Morris explained why she gets so wound up when it comes to issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community after her recent clash with Brittany Aldean.

EXCLUSIVE: Addie Weyrich, Sydney Kuhne and Sabrina Wu are set as leads in FX’s untitled half-hour comedy written by Lauren Ludwig (American Auto, Rob Riggle’s Ski Master Academy).

Mike Wass Fabulous fashion and Katy Perry go hand-in-hand, making her an ideal guest for Season 3 of Mo Heart’s Amazon Music digital series, “The Walk In.” The concept is simple: The “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum pokes around in the closets of music’s biggest stars to admire their most iconic outfits. In Perry’s case, Heart gets up close and personal with that all-denim VMAs tribute to Britney Spears as well as her, er, fruity 2009 Grammys look. “It was inspired by Carmen Miranda, fruit on the head and fruit on the body,” Perry says of the sequined bodice in the glitzy clip. “I haven’t seen this for years.” The hitmaker, 37, then reminisces about the time she wore it for her very first Grammys performance. “It was right when I was making it and everything was happening,” she says, “singing ‘I Kissed A Girl’ — my [religious] parents were deeply ashamed — and I was on my way up.”

EXCLUSIVE: Joseph Amenta, whose debut feature Soft just had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, has signed with M88 for representation.

Lise Pedersen Hotly anticipated LGBT-inclusive superhero animation project “My Superhero Husband” didn’t disappoint at this year’s Cartoon Forum, where the team delivered a pitch perfect pitch that drew enthusiasm from the large crowd gathered at the event. A witty, heartwarming superhero romcom in 2D about the troubles of juggling a job as a superhero, a husband, and a cat, the 10 x 22-minute series is the brainchild of Greek authors Alex Tagali and Mikaela Deligianni. “Whenever you see queer characters on TV nowadays, it’s all about how they’re scared about it, or how they are coming out, or it’s centered around their queerness, and we wanted to make a series that had a lot of love and casual everyday life between a queer couple, but where the focus was not the fact that they are gay,” Tagali told Variety.

The Queer As Folk reboot will be short-lived. Peacock has opted not to pick up a second season of the series created by Russell T. Davies and Stephen Dunn.

Cynthia Erivo is opening up about her coming out experience and why she came out later in life.

Emily Longeretta Netflix has renewed several of its popular unscripted love and dating shows, including “Love on the Spectrum” and “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On.” Additionally, JoAnna Garcia Swisher will host the upcoming series, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.” “Love on the Spectrum,” the docu-reality series following people on the autism spectrum as they navigate the world of dating, will return for a new season following its three Emmy wins. Karina Holden and Cian O’Clery executive produce the Northern Pictures series. “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On,” which debuted in April 2022 and spent four weeks on the Top 10 list, will return for a second season with six new couples all on the verge of marriage. Per the official description, “One partner is ready to get married, the other isn’t quite as sure. An ultimatum is issued – and in just over eight weeks, they must commit to marriage, or move on. In the meantime, each will choose a new potential partner from one of the other couples, in a life-changing opportunity to get a glimpse of two different possible futures.”

Netflix is doubling down on dating.

Parties, proms and meditation practice are on the menu in Queer Sydney this week, making for an incredibly diverse array of things to do and see this weekend and beyond. Fifteen years after its closure, Chinatown’s Harbour City Twin Cinema is being revived by month-long festival Pleasures Playhouse. Starting Thursday, three consecutive parties are to be thrown each night, but only Friday’s show starring a DJ set by Kiwi duo Broods with special appearances by Big Wett and Heaps Gay DJs has tickets still available.Pleasures Playhouse runs until October 31st with a wide range of exciting and queer-inclusive events to come.

Fire Island” will receive The Gotham Film & Media Institute’s ensemble tribute during the 32nd annual Gotham Awards ceremony, Variety has learned exclusively. The announcement comes during the Gotham Week Conference, which concludes Sept. 23 in Brooklyn. The “Fire Island” cast includes Joel Kim Booster, Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora, James Scully, Matt Rogers, Tomás Matos, Torian Miller, Nick Adams, Zane Phillips and Margaret Cho. Directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Booster, the LGBTQ romantic comedy follows best friends Noah (Booster) and Howie (Yang) as they embark on a summer adventure with their eclectic group of friends to Fire Island Pines. Inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the film explores queerness through a diverse, multicultural lens.

GLAAD has hired Julian J. Walker as associate director, Communities of Color & Media.

Katcy Stephan SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers through Episode 5 of ‘House of the Dragon,’ which aired on HBO on Sept. 18 and is streaming on HBO Max.  Emily Carey isn’t here for any Alicent Hightower slander. The 19-year-old “House of the Dragon” star knows her character may not immediately win hearts — the idea of your best friend marrying your father is a tough pill to swallow, after all.  But Carey insists there’s much beneath the surface for the young queen, who they believe deserves more sympathy.   “Marrying Viserys is a choice. But it was never her choice to make. The choice was made by the men around her. The amount of misogyny that Rhaenyra faces, Alicent gets just as much,” the actor tells Variety ahead of the series’ fifth episode. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the little-remembered 1950 noir “The Damned Don’t Cry,” Joan Crawford plays a Texan housewife whose grief for her late son spurs her to make a new life for herself in the urban underworld. Fyzal Boulifa’s exquisite new film of the same title is named expressly for that Crawford vehicle, but is neither a remake nor a direct homage. Rather, it remixes the narrative components of that film and others of its ilk into the kind of new-school-old-school heart-tugger — one might say tearjerker if its characters weren’t, true to its title, stoically dry-eyed throughout — that might have been designed for the shoulder-padded diva were she alive in 2022 and, perhaps more crucially, of Moroccan heritage. 

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In the DC Extended Universe, it’s not the villains who have identity issues, but the heroes. Bruce Wayne watched his parents get murdered, adopted a teenage sidekick and now spends his nights cosplaying as the creature everyone associates with vampires. Kal-El also saw his parents die and goes through life trying to pass as the earthling Clark Kent, wearing spandex under his work clothes, just in case. These are not the traits of well-adjusted normies, and as such, there’s enormous subversive appeal in seeing trans artist Vera Drew turn such iconic characters inside-out in the illicitly made marvel that is “The People’s Joker.” Coming from a place of deep fan love and equally profound institutional mistrust, Drew’s anarchic feature-length parody impishly treads the line of fair use, so much so that the helmer pulled the film from the Toronto Film Festival after its raucous Midnight Madness premiere, citing “rights issues.” But what did she expect? The irreverent underground project reimagines the Joker’s origin story as a queer coming-of-age/coming-to-terms narrative, using a mishmash of styles: mostly crude live-action of the kind you expect from public-access programming (shot against greenscreens, then composited with rudimentary CG sets), embellished with various forms of homemade animation.

A suspect wanted in the stabbing death at a California gay bar, has been arrested.On September 9, Christopher Finley, 28, and Jacob Touchstone went out for a date night and nightcap at Mineshaft bar in Long Beach.An altercation happened between the couple and an unnamed man with a taser and, soon after, an altercation with Smalls, resulting in the couple being stabbed. Finely would pass away eight hours later at the hospital.Smalls is being charged with one count of murder, one count of attempted murder.In a statement, police said there is “no evidence this is a hate or bias-motivated incident.”The couple’s GoFund Me page reveals that the couple has been together since 2016.“From then on, there was never a Jake without a Chris,” the page states. “They had ups and they had downs and they even tried the whole time apart thing, without ever really leaving each others’ lives.

Manori Ravindran International Editor The director of “The People’s Joker,” a queer coming-of-age movie set in the Batman universe, has pulled the movie from the Toronto International Film Festival over alleged “rights issues.” Helmed by Los Angeles-based director Vera Drew, the mixed-media movie follows an aspiring clown (played by Drew) struggling with her gender identity while dreaming of being cast in a TV sketch show among a cast of Jokers and Harlequins. An official synopsis from TIFF reads: “With comedy criminalized in Gotham City, the show is the only government-sanctioned space for funny people, but only those who will toe the party line. Disillusioned by a botched audition, Vera partners with a birdlike slacker to found their own alternative comedy troupe, attracting not only a rogues’ gallery of would-be comics, but also the ire of a fascistic caped crusader.”

Self-described as a ‘bubbly bookish bisexual”, Rhiannon Wilde is deeply interested in championing queer stories and believes that being queer underpins her way of viewing the world, the stories she thinks of and the characters that pop into her head when she writes. When it comes to her writing practice, the themes that she enjoys exploring often stem from a “questioning of the self” and the “defining moments that lead up to and come from it.”She describes her latest novel, Where You Left Us, as one that brings her a lot of joy, where she’s able to approach both mental health and queer relationships by including a character with anxiety and exploring a budding romance that occurs between two bisexual girls. In its earliest forms, Where You Left Us was written as a single perspective from one character before Wilde developed a dynamic between two sisters in the novel and wanted to shed light on the individual journeys that they had. ‘Where You Left Us’ by Rhiannon Wilde. Image: SuppliedShe states that connections between people informs the heart of her work, “be it sisters or first loves or new relationships or very best friends”, and that queerness filters through everything she writes and attaches herself to. Wilde describes Where You Left Us as a “gothic Wuthering-Heights-meets-Evermore” that focuses on the two Prince sisters (Scarlett and Cinnamon), two romantic interests, one family mystery on a cliff by the sea.

Aristotle and Dante Discover The Secrets Of Universe, written and directed by Aitch Alberto, is a film about two queer Mexican boys who discover deep secrets within themselves over the course of a school year. The movie is an adaptation of Benjamin Alire Sáenz YA novel of the same name.