Ren Jender

In the film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” set in 18th-century France, a glance, a stare is everything. The artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to paint the noblewoman Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) so that the man Héloïse’s mother has arranged for her to marry can approve or disapprove of her before the wedding. Héloïse — opposed to the impending nuptials — has refused to sit for portraits before, and at first Marianne must do her job surreptitiously, studying her subject carefully ...

A question that women—not all women, but probably more than men might guess—sometimes ask themselves is, “If I could kill the men who have harmed me and not suffer any consequences, would I?” This question has likely been on women’s minds more in the years both during and after the Trump administration. So writer-director Karen Cinorre’s debut feature film, Mayday (which opened in theaters and started streaming on October 1), feels timely.
The main character, Ana (Grace Van Patten, who played...

I’ll confess: sometime in the early 2000s I kind of gave up on queer film festivals. I still made the effort to attend some of the better-reviewed selections, but unlike in the early to mid ’90s, when much of what I’d seen was nonfiction, experimental, or made by activists (sometimes all three), one after another bland, smiley queer rom-com or tepid drama made their way onto the circuit. The one thing the films all had in common was that after seeing them, I always felt as if I had just exper...

Straight people discovering a beloved queer artist can be tricky. Of course everyone wants their favorite artists to be successful, but what if, in trying to maintain their popularity, those artists start to pander to their new fans?
Seeing what straight people make of Petite Maman, the new film from writer-director Celine Sciamma after her 2019 tour-de-force Portrait of a Lady on Fire should be instructive. Lady was the rare film made by a queer woman about queer women that was an art house ...

When she was a teenager, Ry Russo-Young appeared in Meema Spadola’s documentary Our House, about children across the US with queer parents. After showing in theaters in 2000, the film aired on PBS in 2004, just as queer marriage was starting to be declared legal in some states. The backlash, too, was just beginning. So—perhaps understandably—the families in Our House serve as propaganda: the parents, loving, and the kids, cute, articulate, and seemingly well-adjusted. But Russo-Young, who gre...

When she was sixteen years old, Rosalynde LeBlanc saw the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane modern dance company perform D-Man in the Waters, Jones’s tribute to his late partner, Zane, who had died of AIDS, and to troupe member Demian “D-Man” Acquavella who was likewise very sick (and would soon die of) the same cause. That piece not only won Jones a 1989 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, but it also changed LeBlanc’s life. She joined Jones’s company, staying for six years, and later danc...

In 2019, the first season of Abby McEnany’s semi-autobiographical series Work in Progress (co-created with Tim Mason and co-produced by Lilly Wachowski) told the story of Abby, a forty-something, gray-haired “fat queer dyke” who happens to be suicidal. At the start of Season 2, Abby (played by McEnany) is temporarily living with best friend Campbell (Celeste Pechous) who, to lighten the tension, says, “this is still kind of fun, right?”
“Kind of,” answers Abby. The same could be said of this ...

CW//Suicide
To tell a convincing lie, you should believe it as you tell it, an adage Kristine Stolakis’s film Pray Away brings to mind. Her new documentary features contemporary interviews with the “ex-gay” leaders of anti-queer movements, including Exodus International’s John Paulk and Yvette Cantu Schneider. Most in the film, like Michael Bussee, a co-founder of Exodus who left the organization to be in a committed relationship with his male coworker (the couple discussed their story on tal...

As a risk-averse, 50-something person, I’ve never been on a skateboard and probably never will be (in spite of quite a few women and nonbinary people who seem to have taken up skating during the pandemic.) But I can’t help feeling, at least momentarily, that I should maybe try after watching Betty, the HBO series about young women who skate.
The show premiered last spring and started its second season on June 11. The new season’s first episode can be watched on YouTube for free, and acts as a...

Right now, it feels like an early ’90s resurgence. Sinead O’Connor and the Rugrats are all over the media, and ACT UP is in the news again.
The latest book from writer and ACT UP Oral History co-director Sarah Schulman (also a co-founder of the Avengers!) Let the Record Show which covers ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a direct action group, from 1987-1993 and is mostly made up of interview snippets from the Oral History Project. Schulman spoke to INTO by phone shortly after the ...

One of the frustrating things about growing older is seeing the history you lived through get distorted. The inaccuracies range from the trivial (“No one in the ’80s wore their hair like that”) to serious errors (one of the exact parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS crisis is that the number of deaths were undercounted. The actual death toll was higher). Queer and AIDS activism in the early ’90s were a whirlwind even for those of us who were there (maybe especially for us!), s...

Whenever actors who started their careers as children give interviews I wait for them to talk about money. Sarah Jessica Parker has stated that the considerable income she generated as a minor was, cryptically enough, "absorbed into the family." The new film Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el with a script by star Shia LaBeouf (based on his own life as a child and adult actor) doesn't indulge in Parker's euphemism.
LaBeouf play James, an abusive, neglectful, lying parent who is also a stand-i...

Quick, name the Mexican-American singer who scored chart-topping hits from the late 1960s to the tail-end of the '80s, who put out six platinum-selling albums in a row in the '70s, and whose former touring musicians went on to become one of the most popular '70s bands. You say you don't know who that guy is? Yes, you do: That "guy" is Linda Ronstadt (those musicians in her touring band were Glenn Frey and Don Henley, who went on to form Eagles.)
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, the new ...

the second record from Boston-based rapper Oompa, may have just been released last week, but its roots stretch back to the artist’s childhood. “When I started rapping in middle school, I was a chubby, braided-up kid,” says the former Women of the World poetry slam champion. “People called me ‘Queen Latifah’ or ‘Cleo’ [the name of the queer character Latifah played in the 1996 film Set It Off].”
Oompa felt drawn to Latifah’s character in the film. As she got older, she had a realization: “One ...

Here's Ren Jender on a Sundance movie that moved straight into theaters this weekend...

Writer-director Kitty Green's The Assistant (now open in NYC and LA) is a Jeanne Dielman-like examination of a woman who is the newest assistant in Harvey Weinstein's office (though he's never named) in the time before the revelations of his rape and harassment of women came to light. The film delves into how serial sexual harassment makes the entire office (and of course the industry) complicit, even when...