Milk (2008): The Man Who Said His Name
Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. H...
Next Door Studios: The Network Era
If Falcon represents the studio era of gay pornography — a single brand, a singular aesthetic, a founder's vision expressed through decades of consist...
TitanMen: The Daddy Studio That Took Itself Seriously
In 1995, when Bruce Cam founded TitanMen in San Francisco, the prevailing aesthetic in mainstream gay porn was still the Falcon man: collegiate, smoot...
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...
Active Duty: Two Decades of Selling the Uniform
The military man is one of the oldest standing fantasies in gay culture. The uniform, the haircut, the chain of command, the institutional intimacy of...
The Crying Game (1992): What Desire Actually Is
There is a reveal in The Crying Game that, in 1992, the entire cultural apparatus of film promotion worked to protect. Critics agreed not to mention...
Men.com: The Mainstream Machine
Men.com gay porn, Men.com studio review, best gay porn sites, Men.com scenarios parody, popular gay adult site Men.com occupies a specific and well-d...
Behind the Candelabra (2013): Love in Rhinestones
Every major Hollywood studio passed on Behind the Candelabra. Steven Soderbergh had a script by Richard LaGravenese, two of the most acclaimed actor...
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...
Icon Male: When Porn Tells Stories
Most gay pornography is not interested in storytelling. It has scenarios — the pool boy, the personal trainer, the step-something — but scenarios are...
All of Us Strangers (2023): The Grief You Didn't Know You Were Still Carrying
Andrew Haigh made Weekend in 2011 and All of Us Strangers in 2023, and between those two films something changed — in Haigh, or in what cinema can...