Moonlight (2016): Three Chapters, One Life
Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2017, in a ceremony that will be remembered for the wrong reason — the envelope mixup, the *La L...
Brokeback Mountain (2005): The One That Broke Through
Brokeback Mountain won three Academy Awards, including Best Director for Ang Lee, and was widely expected to win Best Picture before the Academy vot...
Hot House: The San Francisco Studio That Filmed What the City Was Doing
When John Travis founded Hot House Entertainment in 1986, the part of San Francisco gay culture he was about to spend three decades documenting was al...
The Studios That Built Gay Porn: A Cultural History
Gay pornography has a history. Not a shameful one, not a footnote to real culture, but a genuine history — of studios founded by gay men who saw a mar...
Mandate: The Gay Playboy
George Mavety was a Canadian textbook salesman who looked around his Manhattan neighbourhood in the early 1970s and saw something that others had miss...
Passages (2023): Desire Without Apology
Passages was given an NC-17 rating in the United States — the rating that, in practice, makes theatrical distribution impossible — for a scene of ma...
Call Me by Your Name (2017): A Summer That Lasts
Call Me by Your Name is the BoysDo film. Not because it was made for this platform — it wasn't — but because it inhabits, more fully than any other...
God's Own Country (2017): Mud, Cold, and Something Real
God's Own Country arrived in the same year as Call Me by Your Name, and the comparison was immediate and instructive. Both films are about a young...
BelAmi: The European Vision
In 1993, a Hungarian-born director named George Duroy began making gay pornographic films in Slovakia with a group of young men whose look had no prec...
The Magazines That Built Gay Visual Culture: From Physique Pictorial to Elska
Before the internet. Before streaming. Before Tumblr and OnlyFans and the infinite scroll of desire available to any gay man with a phone and a data c...
Helix Studios: The Twink Canon
The twink — slender, youthful, smooth-bodied, often with a boyish quality that sits at the edge of adult without crossing it — is one of the most pers...
The Photographers Who Made the Male Body Art
There is a lineage. It doesn't announce itself, but it's there — running from a Harlem studio in the 1970s through a California beach, a Berlin apartm...