Inhaltsverzeichnis für October 2017 in OUT

WADE DAVIS When writing his essay for our anniversary package (“Waiting for a Gay Superman,” page 84), Davis was taken back to a time when he wasn’t so comfortable with his orientation in the hyper-masculine sports world. “I was trying to distance myself from other men whose gender performance didn’t benefit me,” he says. Davis’s stories on queerness in sports have appeared Sports Illustrated, The Guardian, and Ebony. AUSTIN HARGRAVE Hargrave’s shoot with Fifth Harmony member Lauren Jauregui for this issue (“Lauren Jauregui, Pop Anarchist,” page 17) was a glimpse into the past. “We were going for a 1960s vibe, and she was totally comfortable with the retro clothes and feel,” the photographer says. Hargrave’s work has also appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and DuJour. BRIAN SCHAEFER “Watching footage…

LAUREN JAUREGUI is trying to conceptualize her place in the cosmos. She talks about vibrations, the environment, and her sexuality with the fluidity of a young spiritual leader. The 21-year-old bisexual Cuban-American singer, a member of the multiplatinumselling girl group Fifth Harmony, came out in a letter to Trump supporters last November, and she’s still thinking about our current state of affairs and whether her songs can offer any sort of salvation. “I want to make music that makes people feel things and think differently and want to be on [my] side of thinking,” Jauregui says, sitting in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, her eyes dancing. “Like, come be cool with me.” “You can watch a kid get bombed and not do anything about it, but you can’t watch…

Patterned pullovers can be tricky. Choose the wrong argyle, and it can scan as dated and nerdy. Go all in with an ugly Christmas jumper, and you may have everyone wondering if you’re in on the joke or the actual joke. Luckily, our favorite designers have mastered the art of what we like to call “busy elegance.” Their flashy, cozy new knitwear offerings are guaranteed to punch up any look without overpowering it. From the dreamy watercolor scenes adorning Prada’s latest to the more traditional prints from Bottega, this season’s best sweaters manage to be both eventful and unfussy—hopefully like all the holiday parties you’ll be wearing them to.…

IF YOU’RE A COCKTAIL FAN, you’ve probably noticed pisco popping up more and more across drink menus. The Peruvians have been distilling their special grape brandy for 400 years, but only recently has it captured the imagination of modern mixology. And it’s about time. Pisco Punch, arguably its most famous arrangement, was invented in 1850s San Francisco, and while that recipe still holds up today, concoctions made with the spirit have become far more sophisticated. Zachary Gross directs the beverage program at New York’s Sen Sakana (SenSakana.com), a new midtown restaurant merging the flavors of Peru and Japan in a style known as Nikkei cuisine. There you’ll find fortified pisco blended with Japanese whiskey and topped with bonito flakes, for maximum umami. “One of my other infusions is pisco with…

FOR A WOMAN in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, Masha Gessen’s mother was unusually bold—telling her daughter that the U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state, much like Nazi Germany. This was tantamount to treason in a country that had sacrificed so many lives to defeat Hitler, but true nonetheless. Like mother, like daughter, it would seem: Today Gessen is one of our most urgent and iconoclastic journalists, a siren voice who was warning us about Vladimir Putin on the day he was elected. It’s what has made her such a compelling reporter on Donald Trump. She doesn’t trade in hopeful hypotheses—“once in power Trump will change!”—because she knows that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. A queer Russian Jew who spent…

IN THE EARLY 1980S, Bill T. Jones emerged as an exciting young choreographer who deftly bridged modern and post-modernist dance by mixing elegant physicality with unfussy aesthetics and pedestrian movement. As he was a black man dancing with his white, Jewish partner Arnie Zane, politics of race and sexuality were an appealing part of the package, too. By 1988, Zane had died of AIDS and Jones had been diagnosed with HIV. Fair or not, the disease became part of their legacy. Jones didn’t shy away from it. Identity—the labels we put on or that are put on us—has been, and continues to be, a primary preoccupation of his work. Terminal illness, he decided, was a label worth exploring, too. Over the course of a year, he convened Survival Workshops across…

WHILE QUEER AMERICAN filmmakers were hardening their artistic resolve in response to AIDS, one Spanish director was staging a revolution of his own. A gay aesthete who grew up in the shadow of dictator Francisco Franco’s reign, Pedro Almodóvar used the political and sexual tensions of the era to introduce a singular, hedonistic queer style, which followed few rules save for its maker’s lush visual curation. When Todd Haynes’s Poison hit Sundance in 1991, Almodóvar had dropped seven films in Spain, including Matador, in which he confronted rape head-on, and Law of Desire, in which he dabbled in gender identity and explicit sex. In the U.S., Almodóvar’s key breakthrough was 1999’s All About My Mother, which featured a pregnant nun and, in a bold move at the time, a trans…

ON BEGINNINGS “The opportunity to do Queer Eye came to me serendipitously. At the time, I was a stylist for Ralph Lauren, and one of our shoot producers had heard about the show and thought I should try out for it. Until then I thought Bravo was a non-stick cooking spray. But the rest is history!” ON THE SHOW’S TITLE “Even I thought it may have been too much for mainstream America, but I have to give credit to the show creators and producers, David Metzler and David Collins. This gay/ straight duo received a lot of resistance from the networks—many of whom passed on the show—about the name. But David was adamant, citing that one of the definitions of ‘queer’ was ‘extraordinary’ and ‘seeing things from a different point of view.’…

Sarah Palin: “[She] has now started to play the allegorical role of the guy who hangs out in the high school parking lot showing off his car five years after he graduated.” (April 2009) Donald Rumsfeld: “I would love to hear [his] thoughts on light rail or growing mushrooms. [He can] talk to me about acid reflux or bonsai gardening or home remedies for boils. But when it comes to wisdom on invading Iraq, [he has] expired.” (March 2013) Republicans: “If you kicked them out of your bedroom, they would have no idea where else to go.” (April 2013) Mark Sanford: “Watching [him] try to launch a political comeback in South Carolina these past few months has been the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of American off-year electoral politics.” (May 2013)…

AFTER DECADES of living in the shadows, the transgender community finally began to see true cultural recognition in 2014. That year, Laverne Cox made history as the first trans actor to be nominated for an Emmy (for Orange Is the New Black), and, months later, the world was introduced to Transparent, Jill Soloway’s Amazon series—and eventual smash hit—about the Pfeffermans, a family with a transgender matriarch named Maura (Jeffrey Tambor). Collectively, these very public events would be a beacon of hope for trans people. For Alexandra Billings, who plays Davina, Maura’s trans best friend on the show, it cemented a lengthy career as an openly transgender actress. “I think what’s resonating with the show’s viewers is the sense of family,” Billings says. “It’s a very fractured, complicated, chaotic, hilarious, insane…

The elevator doors open to the fourth floor of World of Wonder studios. I’m half an hour early, but RuPaul is already there, in his plaid coral-and-aqua Mr. Turk suit, engrossed with his iPad. A part of me wants to scurry back into the elevator—the domineering image of Mama Ru from nine seasons of his titular Drag Race writ large on my imagination—but finding the appropriate nerve, I introduce myself, extending a hand in greeting. He shakes it for a second, before letting his shoulders collapse in disappointment. “You gotta give it to me harder than that.” My handshake, it seems, is not firm enough. RuPaul then lectures me on the importance of a strong handshake and looking the other person squarely in the eye. If he had told me…

Franco, Frankly With a subject as famously fickle and experimental as actor-director-writer-artist James Franco, it’s hard to predict where a conversation might lead. Even a probing interviewer like queer literary icon Edmund White, who sat down with Franco for our September cover story, couldn’t have guessed he’d get a glimpse into a past streaked with addiction and isolation. In media coverage of our piece on the star, who appears in—and co-directs—HBO’s porn-fueled drama The Deuce, headlines zeroed in on the darker elements of Franco’s youth, like his battle with depression and the dangers of his compulsive personality. “He gave a wide-ranging interview,” wrote People, “covering everything from early struggles to his latest challenge: directing sex scenes.” It’s a fair assessment, considering Franco and White’s conversation also touched on surfing, bygone…

In places where gay rights aren’t on a par with human rights, glass closets are justified as a necessary mezzanine—even portrayed as progress. “WHAT TIME ARE YOU LEAVING?” my Greek boyfriend asked me. “Because my sister is coming at 7 A.M. tomorrow.” I veiled my Seriously? face with a “6:55” jest. This was an exchange between two middle-aged men—a fact that makes the use of the word “boyfriend” problematic. Manfriend, maybe? Partner? But we didn’t have a partnership. That would require a commitment between two parties as witnessed by—or at least in relation to—other, third parties. We did not have that, or not exactly. Although I had been out for 20 years, my friend had been living his adult life in a glass closet. Everyone could see that he was…

 THE FUTURE of queer cinema was mapped out in 1992. That was the year of four surprising breakthroughs: The Crying Game represented the Hollywood mainstream; The Living End propelled the indie movement; Rock Hudson’s Home Movies burst forth from the avant-garde; and Savage Nights emerged from the European art world. Araki magnetized connections between the straight world and gay subculture. Previously underserved gay filmgoers, who’d been relying on maybe one or two marginal films a year, suddenly faced a variety of entertainment options. Equally important, these four films laid out new routes of creative freedom and imagination. Moviemakers, regardless of orientation, could pursue stories and plots that acknowledged queer life through different angles and with distinct attitudes. Genres from romance to fantasy and even documentary were used to explore the…

DEAR RICKIE, Your friend Angela Chase once said, “This life has been a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do.” She was right, you know? This life is a test, but it is an actual life. It’s a life where you will be tested on how much love you can share, how authentic you can be with the people in your life and with yourself, and it’s a test of how resilient you are when this life will, inevitably, try to knock you down. Deep down you already know this, Rickie. At 15 years old, you are passing this test with flying colors. You’ve proven to be the physical embodiment of love. The only thing you…

7 Ranking of Rent among Broadway’s longest-running shows $31,670,620 Global gross of the 2005 Hollywood film adaptation ($29,077,547 domestic + $2,593,073 foreign) 12 Number of years the show ran onstage (1996 to 2008) 525, 600 Number of minutes in a year, per the Rent song “Seasons of Love” $280m+ Total gross of the show’s ticket sales 930,180 Running time in minutes of accumulated performances 6 Number of continents that have mounted the production April 29, 1996: Opening night of the Broadway production $10,016,021 Opening-weekend gross of the film version 5,123 Total number of performances of the show at New York’s Nederlander Theatre Out in Photos Lee Daniels and Jahil Fisher, photographed by Benedict Evans for Out’s annual Love Issue, February 2015 “This sitting was a highlight of 2015 for me.…

FROM CRISTÓBAL Balenciaga to Karl Lagerfeld to Yves Saint Laurent, gay designers have always been a part of fashion, but the ’90s saw a wave of audacious, very out gay men, with both huge talents and personalities, entrusted with the keys to the luxury kingdom. In 1994, Tom Ford was appointed creative director of Gucci, which had fallen on hard times after a series of scandals and bad business decisions. Under Ford’s guidance, the Italian label re-emerged with an aesthetic that fetishized sex and glamour, epitomized by provocative, often homoerotic ad campaigns. “Sex is just second nature with me,” Ford later told Out in 2007. “It’s not, like, an obsession or anything.” A year later, John Galliano took over Givenchy, replacing the retiring founder, Hubert de Givenchy, 43 years after…

IN 2002, Peaches released her gleefully smutty album The Teaches of Peaches, and found herself smack dab in the middle of a movement. Electroclash was a genre- and gender-defying fusion of punk, new wave, techno, and performance art, and while it earned its fair share of detractors—who deemed it everything from an uninspired recycling of old sounds to a fleeting gimmick that favored style over substance—its dirty digital beats, hedonistic mantras, and outlandish costumes are part of the pop-music fabric now. Here, Fischerspooner’s Casey Spooner, Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, and Peaches, all of whom played at the first Electroclash Festival, discuss its origins and legacy. JAKE SHEARS: The first time I heard the term “electroclash” was probably straight out of Larry Tee’s mouth. He was such a brilliant and shameless…

LONG THOUGHT TO BE in decline in the 1990s, the queer novel, it turned out, was just gestating into a new phase. Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours and Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Man Booker Prize winner, The Line of Beauty, were distinctly gay novels, and both vividly articulated the horrors of AIDS, but they also took a panoramic view of the world, making them more accessible to straight readers. (More recently, the Jamaican writer Marlon James became the first black queer writer to win the Man Booker, with his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.) It’s no coincidence that both Cunningham and Hollinghurst took inspiration from their literary heroes—Virginia Woolf and Henry James, respectively—in creating deceptively classical novels with historical sweep and social nuance. The Hours was a…

GUS VAN SANT’S sensitive and compelling biopic of gay icon Harvey Milk won two Academy Awards, one for Sean Penn’s performance in the title role, and the other for screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who used the occasion to deliver an exceptionally moving speech in which he talked about the hope he’d derived as a child in a Mormon family from hearing about Milk. “I played with a framework in my head on a hike the morning of the awards, but when I hit the stage, I mostly just spoke from the heart, praying the producers wouldn’t cut me off,” he recalls today. “My mom was very sick at the time with cancer—a fight she ultimately lost—but she was there in the audience with a decent wig and a marriage-equality ribbon…

“A tornado flew around my room before you came / Excuse the mess it made, it usually doesn’t rain in Southern California, much like Arizona / My eyes don’t shed tears, but boy, they pour when I’m thinkin’ ’bout you.” —“Thinkin Bout You” “If it brings me to my knees it’s a bad religion / This unrequited love / To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult and cyanide in my styrofoam cup / I can never make him love me / Never make him love me.” —“Bad Religion” “I know you, Forrest / I know you wouldn’t hurt a beetle / But you’re so buff and so strong / I’m nervous, Forrest, Forrest Gump / My fingertips and my lips / They burn from Also in... 2012 David France…

“I’m a dyke!” —February 2002, coming out onstage at Carolines Comedy Club “I said I wanted him to mow my lawn and bring me a lemonade. I never said I wanted to blow him.” —March 2002, in response to criticism that her professed love of Tom Cruise misled people about her orientation “I hope the Catholic Church gets sued until the end of time. Maybe we can melt down some of the gold toilets in the pope’s Vatican and pay off some of the lawsuits.” —February 2003, condemning Christianity on MSNBC “Big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie attacks innocent, pure, Christian Elisabeth.” —May 2007, on how her on-air fight with View co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck would get spun in the media “To Donald Trump and his pathetic band of white, privileged, criminal…

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“I’VE ALWAYS loved taking risks and pushing boundaries, whether the world was ready or not,” writes Calvin Klein in the introduction to Calvin Klein, a handsome new collection of the designer’s erotically charged images dating back to the mid-1970s, when Helmut Newton photographed Lisa Taylor staring down a shirtless guy—sexually provocative for its time, but also resonant of an era defined by the hedonism of disco and Studio 54. Fittingly, it was in the famous club, at 3 A.M. one morning in 1977, that Klein was approached by a fashion executive inviting him to design jeans. He didn’t need much persuading. “I immediately said yes,” he writes. “To me, jeans were a state of mind that was young, sexy, and rebellious.” Jeans, and the ads that sold them, would…

Here’s to more songs (but earlier nights) on the long and circuitous road to the better future we all want and deserve. And to the issue that comes next. HOW DO YOU WRITE an editor’s letter marking an anniversary? You could start with a little cheap nostalgia, recalling, for example, that Out launched in the same year as Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” (I think I know which I’d rather hear again, and it’s not Whitney). Or we could remark on the fact that just as Out hit newsstands, Bill Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show, where he played “Heartbreak Hotel” on his saxophone, setting the stage for his victory over George H.W. Bush in November. You might point to…

Is there anything in fashion more foolproof than leather? It’s had us covered for centuries, first to protect our bodies from the elements, then later to show a total disregard for anything boring, oppressive, or conventional. Lou Reed wore it, George Michael wore it, daddies at the Eagle wear it, Eddie Redmayne rocks it all the time. It’s durable, versatile, and, best of all, one of the few materials that looks better with age. This season, designers are celebrating leather in all its guises. Versace is doing pants, Calvin Klein 205W39NYC has dreamed up entire head-to-toe ensembles, and Loewe has magically made a butcher-style apron look impossibly chic. That’s the power of leather: Throw it on, and no one will dare question you.…

Alfred Hitchcock chilled moviegoers to the bone, but he always managed to imbue his tales of evil with a touch of class. Today, the modern antihero can channel his mystery and poise with a crisp white button-up, shiny black oxfords, or a fedora—perfect for casting that long Hitchcockian shadow over your brow. And like the legendary filmmaker, you can always add a twist, be it a black ski mask (to keep warm, of course) or a sleek black briefcase that will leave onlookers wondering what’s inside. Take a stylish cue from the man who kept us all on edge, and be your own master of suspense.…

What is TRUVADA for PrEP? TRUVADA for PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is a prescription medicine that is used together with safer sex practices to help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 through sex. This use is only for HIV-negative adults who are at high risk of getting HIV-1. To help determine your risk of getting HIV-1, talk openly with your healthcare provider about your sexual health. Ask your healthcare provider if you have questions about how to prevent getting HIV. Always practice safer sex and use condoms to lower the chance of sexual contact with body fluids. Never reuse or share needles or other items that have body fluids on them. IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION What is the most important information I should know about TRUVADA for PrEP? Before taking TRUVADA for…

IN MANUEL PUIG’S 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, a gay window dresser obsessed with escapist films befriends a straight, leftist revolutionary when they share a South American prison cell. Told with a colorful, pop-art sensibility in long stretches of dialogue, documents, and fictionalized movie reviews, the book inspired a 1985 film that won William Hurt an Oscar and earned a nod for Best Picture—a high bar for future adaptations. A musical seemed unlikely until the gay lyricist-composer team of Fred Ebb and John Kander (of Cabaret and Chicago fame) corralled legendary producer Hal Prince and playwright Terrence McNally to give it a go. An out-of-town workshop fell flat, but a revived production in London and Toronto earned enough buzz to bring it to Broadway in 1993, where it…

Susan... I'm gay. THE SCENE I REMEMBER most from the coming-out episode of Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom isn’t actually the one in which she first announces she is gay, accidentally speaking to her crush Susan (Laura Dern) over an airport loudspeaker. That moment’s great, but what’s really burned into my memory is the next episode, when Ellen Morgan is chopping vegetables in her apartment with her already-out friend Peter and casually slips an “I’m gay” into the middle of a conversation about melon ballers. The failed attempt at casualness, the shock it produces, the awkwardness of the character’s revelation—the gay gravity of it all—hit little closeted me so hard. Sitting on my parents’ couch, I remember looking around to make sure no one else heard it, as if Ellen coming out…

1. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” 2. “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” 3. “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” 4. “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.” 5. “We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.” 6. “Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.” 7. “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” 8. “It does not do to…

“YEAH, YOU GAY, but you ain’t no faggot,” the man explained with pride—smirking as if he had offered me a generous compliment. Seconds earlier a young man had walked past with a glide that caused a deep, uncomfortable stir within the barbershop. One of the patrons laughed and said, with a forced disdain, “These faggots are too much in the summertime.” Motioning in my direction, the barber, a friend, responded, “Hey man, chill out.” But the ugly truth is that to people like my barbershop antagonist, and many others, how gay men perform gender makes a difference. There are gay men who kneel at the altar of patriarchal masculinity—wanting the perceived benefits that heterosexual men enjoy—and there are gay men who embrace their “difference” and exist in the world in…

FOR SOMEONE WHO at first seemed coy on the subject, President Obama’s evolution on marriage equality was something to behold. He came to office reiterating that marriage was an institution reserved for a man and a woman, and continued to hold that line throughout most of his first term, even while advancing other important legislation, including the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” His public conversion on May 9, 2012, telegraphed just how far the country had moved. It took a few more years for the president to agree that marriage equality was a constitutional matter, rather than one left up to the states, but by November 2012, Americans were electing the nation’s first pro-gay marriage president. When he was sworn in on January 20, 2009, there were two states…

SEEING DOUBLE In an exclusive illustration for Out, artist Thomas Allen paid homage to American Gothic and Ru’s gender-bending dual identities in one fell, fabulous swoop. DON’T GO BREAKING MY ART In 1993, with the help of mega-producer Giorgio Moroder, Ru teamed with Elton John for a spirited remake of John’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” first recorded with Kiki Dee in 1976. We’d call it Ru’s most flamboyant duet... if not for those ones with Michelle Visage.…