http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=4z5Q7LhI+KVBjmEgFdYACPLKh239P3pgcVRfbCz8BBaUjEACaBDqQCES+QFhu/lqf5TsvBUcQvfVdNC9Z3p1StVzcErO4TTUyLXH30/vNBVYscrSfL57O/32OgB9a1JG80D3xDZoD9UYQb+z/4Z3VpGmY2liCPrK0TXHXM5gO1gf0O7OiW/L4g==&campaign_id=129&instance_id=32059&segment_id=50176&user_id=00d8dfed3481017da331a50dd50a05d6®i_id=17861175 ________________________________ September 5, 2013 Putting the Sex in HomosexualityBy STEPHEN HOLDEN Amid the euphoria following the Supreme Court’s striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, allowing married gay and lesbian couples to enjoy federal benefits granted to wedded heterosexuals, one word that remains seldom heard is “sex.” Sex, as sexual orientation? Yes. Sexual, as in sexual equality? Yes. But the thing itself, the primal catalyst? Not much. In public discourse, sex acts that not so long ago were widely criminalized have gone largely unmentioned amid the torrent of high-minded rhetoric about equality. The face of gay liberation in 2013 is a sanitized image of polite, smiling gay and lesbian couples parading hand in hand and exchanging chaste kisses at city halls in states where gay marriage has been legalized. But if there’s a theme to the 25th annual NewFest, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film festival that opens on Friday at the Walter Reade Theater, it is that gay liberation is fundamentally about sex. The Supreme Court decision may further validate the rights of gays and lesbians, but their practices in the bedroom are still repugnant to a lot of people. Recent attacks in New York City indicate that a change in the law doesn’t automatically erase prejudice. This year the number of festival selections that include explicit sex is a provocative reminder that even in these relatively liberated times, for many people — gay as well as straight — homosexual behavior and gender fluidity are still synonymous with the Other. Some gay activists lament the fading away of the eroticized outlaw mystique of homosexuality. NewFest, which runs through Wednesday and includes 15 narrative features, 4 documentaries and 31 shorts and other special events, offers many acute reminders that history doesn’t suddenly disappear into the mist because laws have changed. For gay men of a certain age, the worst days of the AIDS epidemic, when they lost countless friends and loved ones, are still painfully present. One of the strongest entries in this year’s festival is Chris Mason Johnson’s film “Test.” Set in San Francisco in 1985, “Test” remembers that fraught time when AIDS patients were dying in droves, treatment was in its infancy, and an H.I.V. test had just been developed. Frankie (Scott Marlowe), a young dancer who has led an erotically free life, worries that he may have contracted the virus. He minutely inspects himself for symptoms and debates with trepidation whether to take the test. Frankie belongs to a dance company whose male members are mostly gay. The personal stakes escalate when he begins a tentative relationship with the company’s promiscuous and macho bad boy (Matthew Risch). The movie offers a detailed look at the inner working of a small dance company, and Sidra Bell’s choreography illustrates the theme of eroticized danger without going overboard. “Test” has already been compared to Bill Sherwood’s 1986 film, “Parting Glances,” set during the AIDS crisis and starring Steve Buscemi. Today that film is widely regarded as a landmark of gay cinema. The concept of sexual transgression runs through the festival. The protagonist of Stacie Passon’s “Concussion,” the opening-night film, is a woman whose longtime relationship with her female partner has lost its spark. After a head injury, she embarks on a secret life as an escort, offering her services to women for $800 a session. The movie received a mixed response at the Sundance Film Festival this year. “Concussion” has pride of place in NewFest, indicating the dearth of lesbian movies in the marketplace. The year’s most anticipated such film, Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is graphically explicit in a way “Concussion,” which keeps most of the lovemaking beneath the sheets, is not. “Blue” will be shown next month at the New York Film Festival. Explicit images of sexual arousal are found in “Interior. Leather Bar.,” directed by Travis Mathews and James Franco, which reimagines the 40 minutes of footage cut from the 1980 gay slasher movie, “Cruising,” from a contemporary perspective. That film arrived at a moment in the gay liberation movement when urban centers like New York and San Francisco were gripped by a kind of erotic delirium in which men pursued a hypermasculine ideal and promiscuity was rampant. “Interior. Leather Bar.” captures some of that heady ambience of sweaty disco and extreme sex in all-night gay S&M clubs. But the action in the movie doesn’t compare in intensity to the crazed heat in “Cruising.” And that may be the point. Intentionally or not, “Interior. Leather Bar.” implies that the era of unbridled license was a moment in gay cultural history that has largely passed. It’s dangerous to generalize, but the frenzied activity epitomized by the slogan “so many men, so little time” seems to have abated. Within gay and lesbian culture, a more contemporary, pragmatic attitude is expressed in Christina Voros’s documentary “Kink,” a coolheaded, cheerful examination of the pornography industry from the viewpoint of kink.com, a San Francisco studio specializing in films about bondage, discipline and S&M. The movie teems with images of men and women filmed while being bound and flogged, and there are quasi-medical discussions of the physiology of S&M and pleasure. The one outright dud among the explicit films that fancy themselves transgressive is Yann Gonzalez’s “You and the Night,” a ludicrously arty French trifle in which a transvestite maid arranges a solemn pansexual orgy, though not much really happens. At Cannes last spring, it reportedly emptied the theater. Of the several fraught love stories in this year’s NewFest, Stephen Lacant’s “Free Fall” is one of the strongest. A German police officer, engaged to his pregnant girlfriend, falls in love with his training partner, and the two conduct a heated clandestine affair. Its stars, Hanno Koffler and Max Riemelt, are handsome, their sex is hot, and the impact on the fiancée (Katharina Schüttler) and on the engaged couple’s families is devastating. “Free Fall” is an upsetting and believable study of the disruptive power of unleashed desire. Among the festival’s documentaries, one of the most powerful is Marta Cunningham’s “Valentine Road,” which explores the aftermath of a 2008 classroom shooting. Lawrence King, a 15-year-old transgendered student in junior high school, was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range by a 14-year-old fellow student, Brandon McInerney, in Oxnard, Calif. Two days later Lawrence, who had asked Brandon to be his valentine, died. Three years later Mr. McInerney was sentenced as an adult to 21 years in prison. After examining the case from every angle, “Valentine Road” implies that irrational fear and loathing of the Other is built into us, and that despite the law, acceptance comes slowly, one victory at a time.
