Cruising (1980): The Celluloid Dungeon

 Celluloid Dungeon  7 Responses »
Mar 162019
 

Cruising (1980) is a thriller directed and written by William Friedkin, based on a novel by Gerald Walker.

William Friedkin, well known for directing The French Connection and The Exorcist, already had history (not necessarily the good kind) with LGBTQ topics when he directed The Boys in the Band (1970), released only a year after Stonewall. Even before it was made, Cruising was controversial, and gay activists repeatedly interfered with the filming. However, the film also included many patrons of gay leather clubs in the club scenes.

Steve (Pacino) slips into the New York leather scene.
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Review: Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground, by Richard Pérez Seves

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Mar 072019
 

Richard Pérez Seves has written a thorough and visually engrossing study of fetish artist Eric Stanton and the world he lived in. Stanton was one of the major artists to define the post-WWII American style of fetish and BDSM art, when this genre was very much underground. Seves managed to get access to impressive quantities of ephemera of the artist’s life and interviews with his friends and families.

Photo of young Stanton, Pg.24
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8MM (1999): The Celluloid Dungeon

 Celluloid Dungeon  7 Responses »
Mar 052019
 

8MM (1999) (IMDB) is a mystery/thriller film directed by Joel Schumacher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker (who also wrote the vastly superior Se7en (1995)).

Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is a private investigator for upper crust clients. An elderly widow, Mrs. Christian, says she found a roll of 8mm film in her late husband’s safe, which appears to document the murder of a young white woman. Wells is skeptical, saying it’s probably fake, but the widow hires him to find the girl.

Welles (Cage) watches the film apparently showing the murder of an unknown girl (Jenny Powell).
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Kinjite Forbidden Subjects (1989): The Celluloid Dungeon

 Celluloid Dungeon  No Responses »
Feb 182019
 

Not all of the works I plan on exploring in The Celluloid Dungeon will have BDSM as a primary or even secondary theme. Some will have BDSM in a single scene or even a single moment.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, a 1989 crime thriller starring Charles Bronson, is not a good film, by most standards. It’s mainly about an older racist cop, Lt. Crowe (Bronson), harassing and brutalizing non-white people in Los Angeles in pursuit of an exploitative pimp, Duke. That story is awkwardly spliced with another story about a Japanese salaryman, Hada, who moves with his wife and two daughters to Los Angeles. Hada’s elder daughter, Fumiko, somewhere in her early teens, is kidnapped, raped multiple times (offscreen, thankfully) and pimped out, before Crowe rescues her.

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Link Roundup, February 2019

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Feb 162019
 
  • I’m old enough to remember how different and exciting the Internet was in the 1990s. So does Violet Blue, who lays out just much has changed for the worse since then, especially with the censoring of Tumblr last year. “I can tell you for a fact that Tumblr helped a generation of frightened, isolated kids trying to figure out their sexual identity.” Her essay on Engadget.
  • David Wraith has an overview of how terrible the SESTA/FOSTA laws are, stifling freedom of expression on sexual matters while subjecting sex workers to greater danger.
  • On the brighter side, England has reviewed its obscenity laws and a number of kinks, including spanking, BDSM, and female ejaculation, are now okay in porn, as long as they are shown as consensual.
  • Kink Guidelines is a project “to explore what constitutes clinical best practices in working with those who are interested and/or involved in kink, BDSM, and/or fetish eroticism.
  • The city leaders of San Francisco have approved the construction of Eagle Plaza, a small park commemorating the Eagle bar’s contribution to the LGBTQ and leather/kink cultures.
  • Lupercalia, the ancient Roman festival that loosely corresponds to Valentine’s Day, was known for men playfully whipping women “believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy”, according to Plutarch. Today, whipping rituals are a part of fertility festivals in parts of Europe, Mexico and Asia. From Vice.
  • Even though Walmart, regular drugstores and other mainstream retailers now stock vibrators and other sex toys, sex products are still caught up in controversy. Producers risk rejection from retailers, payment processors, crowdsourcing platforms, and advertising venues. Sex toys have to toe the line of being for “health and wellness”, not for pleasure, which would be prurient. The Verge has more.
  • Puppyplay for gay kinksters seems to be on the rise lately, and Slate has a profile of a San Francisco polyamorous pack.
  • Kerrang has a list of BDSM-themed songs, including the classic “Venus in Furs” by Velvet Underground.

Payback (1999): The Celluloid Dungeon

 Celluloid Dungeon  1 Response »
Feb 072019
 

Payback (IMDB) is a 1999 neo-noir crime thriller, starring Mel Gibson.

In The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo talked about the phase of American movies in which queer film characters existed mainly as dramatic or comedic foils to the straight characters. Whether they were swishy nellies or twisted sadists, they were a simple object lesson in proper and improper gender roles. That extends to the present day, though perhaps a little less overt: heroes are associated with heterosexuality, monogamy, vanilla sex, and other normative sexualities, while villains tend towards bisexuality, non-monogamy, and fetishes and kinks.

Pearl (Lucy Liu) stomps on Val, while Porter (Mel Gibson) watches
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Review: Dominatrix, by Danielle J. Lindemann

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Feb 042019
 

Lindemann, Danielle J. 2012. Dominatrix: gender, eroticism, and control in the dungeon. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

“Professional dominatrix” is an archetype that attracts attention out of proportion to the number of people who actually fit that description. For many, they are the symbol of BDSM in general, a representation of the perversity of men, simultaneously attractive and absurd. Are they trickster courtesans manipulating men via their weaknesses, or just another type of sex worker?

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Link Roundup, January 2019

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Jan 222019
 
  • The Divine Deviance documentary, in which I am a contributor, is holding another round of fundraising. Even a small contribution can help make this valuable documentary possible.
  • The University of Guelph is running an anonymous survey on kinky people and their relationships.
  • In the UK, BDSM is still technically illegal, ever since the case of Brown 1993, also known as the Operation Spanner case. Samantha Pegg, a criminal law lecturer, discusses the possible legal reform regarding BDSM, while still emphasizing that consent should not negate all legal liability.
  • Cosmopolitan UK has a frank discussion of a woman’s involvement in BDSM as a way of processing her earlier rape.
  • Narratively has a feature on an AA meeting held in the basement of a fetish shop in NYC, and addresses the difficulty of kinky people hiding or revealing their kink in therapy or recovery settings. Starting in the 1950s, Alcoholics Anonymous refused to list gay meetings in their literature. This policy did not change until 1974. It’s also important to remember that a lot of NYC kink venues in the 1980s had a lot of liquor and drugs around.
  • Modern Meadow is a biotech company pioneering a kind of artificially-grown leather. Instead of a plastic like pleather, this is an organic material grown in a factory. This has several advantages over conventional leather production: less environmental impact from caustic substances, less animal cruelty, and it can be grown in large sheets to order. How this compares to conventional leather in terms of fetish or fashion remains to be seen. “Modern Meadow is not… actually out to ape leather. Rather, the firm’s aim is to produce a new material in its own right, complete with brand name.” The company’s line of materials is called Zoa. Perhaps some future generation of fetishists will prefer it to leather.
  • Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, is a dramatic look at possibly the most emotionally and culturally charged form of kink: raceplay. Three couples (two hetero, one gay male) flipflop between antebellum fantasies of racial domination and modern scenes of couples arguing. Interview with the playwright (video)
  • We’re facing a new rising tide of online censorship in online communities like Tumblr and Facebook. Gloria Brame has a few tips on surviving this. Race Bannon discusses how, like it or not, social networks like Tumblr and Facebook have replace physical gathering spaces for connecting, organizing and discussing our sexualities. The moral panic over sex trafficking has led to SESTA/FOSTA and the subsequent restrictions on social networks, as covered by Cookie Cyboid on Medium.
  • The mainstreaming of (a heteronormative subset of) kink in the form of Fifty Shades Darker coincided with Fetlife deleting a large amount of images and groups, and Kink.com moving out of the Armory building in San Francisco. MEL magazine covers the economic and social fortunes of the kink world.
  • Waterboarding as a form of torture goes back at least to the Spanish Inquisition, but I would hazard there’s been an increased interest from the kink community in the last couple of decades. It’s been banned by the United Nations and classified as torture by the UN, and the US government has forbidden it. That adds an additional element of taboo to this technique, which would explain its popularity with certain edge players. It’s also more dangerous than some people think. Rolling Stone covers the controversy.
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