GAYLETTER

Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini met at a party in the West Village about 8 years ago while they were both attending NYU. Dan Sickles is 26 from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Antonio is 25 from San Juan, Puerto Rico. They are the directors of the film Mala Mala, a documentary about the transgender community of Puerto Rico that’s now playing at the IFC Center in NYC. We were drawn to this powerful story and decided to reach out to the directors, to shoot them and ask them some questions. 

Tell me about when you first met? 

Dan Sickles: It was at a party in the West Village?

Antonio Santini: Yeah…I walked in and he was wearing a sombrero, and the party was really boring. It was my birthday the next week, so I sent him a Facebook message and was like “hey, you want to come to my party? As my date?”

DS: He asked if I’d come and I went and I don’t know, we just started hanging out after that.

AS: And we became friends.

Did you guys date right after that? 

DS: No, we’ve never dated.

When did you start working on this film?

DS: Almost three years ago, December 2011.

So how did you become interested in the transexual community in Puerto Rico?

DS: That’s a bit of a long story. Antonio and I had met this drag queen Maggie, in Austin, Texas. It was at a competition at this club, and she was incredible, but a terrible drag queen in most senses, like she wasn’t a good dancer, she wasn’t into the whole lip singing thing, she had props that were like used almost like weapons. …

The critically panned (but still hot) 1998 film 54 starring Ryan Phillippe, Mike Myers and Salma Hayek (about the legendary nightclub Studio 54) was waaaaay gayer before power producer Harvey Weinstein got his chubby little hands on it to cut out over 44 mins of queer scenes to make it more “palatable” to mainstream audiences. I remember when this film first came out, thinking there was something missing from the story, that something was being held back. It definitely had a queer undertone, but never delivered much more than a bunch of a scenes with a shirtless Ryan Phillippe (which was greatly appreciated) and Mike Myers rolling around a bed piled with $20 bills. It’s good to finally hear the real story behind the film. Here’s how it went down:

“Writer-director Mark Christopher spent five years researching the disco scene to sketch this authentic portrait of the notoriously outrageous party palace ruled by its founder, unctuous Steve Rubell (Mike Myers, in an acclaimed dramatic turn). When test audiences condemned some of the film’s controversial content (involving Ryan Phillippe’s busboy turned bartender and Breckin Meyer’s husband to club-diva Salma Hayek), Christopher was asked to recut the film and reshoot key scenes, including the finale. Seventeen years later, the filmmaker’s intent, which includes 44 minutes of never-been-seen material, has been restored. “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” claimed Rubell, and Christopher’s director’s cut honors that Dionysian vision.”

Come see the original edit, in all it’s gay glory this Tuesday, June 23rd at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. …

My very first full time salaried job in NYC was with a pr firm we basically had two clients, Grace Jones and Peter Gatien who was about to open the Limelight. We even had our offices in the Limelight in a tiny space on the third floor in back of the club we accessed through the vip entrance on W. 20th Street. I say all this to let you know when this riveting documentary Glory Daze:The Life and Times of Michael Alig (the legendary king of the club kids) came by my desk I was beyond intrigued. The film is making it’s debut June 20th as part of the Manhattan Film Festival, don’t miss it.

Michael Alig really set the scene ablaze when he began to host this outrageous Wednesday night party called Disco 2000-drugs,sex,kink and more drugs ruled, and over the course of time the party got darker and descended into the death grip of too many chemicals and k-holes. At the zenith of this mess Alig murdered and dismembered a fellow club kid and drug dealer Andre ‘Angel’ Melendez and went to prison for 17 years once he was finally caught. The film chronicles the time leading up to the murder with interviews with with Alig and some of the major players in  the scene as well as follows Alig after his release from jail in May 2014 as he tries to cope with a new world he is about to become integrated into.

I had long been gone from the pr job at the Limelight by the time the club kids reign took over but I had this feeling Peter Gatien and his club’s story was not going to end well, a club in a church? …

I can still see a 20-year-old me, cowering in front of my Facebook screen after the NYC Queer filmmaker and former contributing editor of BUTT Magazine Adam Baran publicly reamed me for posting a status which he found revolting and bourgeois (it was). His endlessly sophisticated proclivities include a deep appreciation for David Lynch‘s iconic TV show “Twin Peaks,” of which I have never watched a full episode. I will, however, be contributing to the Kickstarter campaign he has going for his new film, “Northwest Passage,” which follows the dark and incredible journey of a Twin Peaks super fanboy whose real life becomes as strange and Lynch-ian as….well….Lynch, and you should contribute too. Here’s why.

Nowadays Travis Blue is something of a legend in certain NYC circles, but in the early nineties he was a lonesome and cruelly abused gay boy living in rural Washington, until the magical day when David Lynch shows up to film his new TV show in Travis’s backyard. Stepping through the looking glass into the world of Lynch’s imagination, young Travis becomes a fixture on the set, and then in the passionate subculture of Twins Peaks fandom. As Travis’s fascination with Laura Palmer, the show’s gruesomely murdered heroine, becomes an obsession, Travis falls deeper down the rabbit hole as his life takes on the properties of his drugged-out, trick-turning TV role model, bringing him to the teetering edge of a similar fate.

Transcending Twin Peaks, and more than just a tale of superfandom, “Northwest Passage” is a thrilling/creepy/sexy look at one gay boy’s jaw dropping coming-of-age tale, and Baran sees it as an exploration of “how we as a society process fiction.” …

I am totally enamored by artist Kehinde Wiley. For one thing he throws the most fabulous (and generous) parties in his massive, exquisitely appointed SoHo loft on many of the calendar’s holidays. But more importantly Kehinde,“has carved out a place for the heroic African-American figure in classical Western portraiture.” That’s quite a feat for just one man! Last year this intimate documentary by Jeff Dupre was brought to BAM —  Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace. For those of you that didn’t get a chance to go and see it, now you can watch it online for free. All I know is that the film deals with the artist’s exploration of female portraiture to reveal another side of black femininity. In the opening of the trailer for the film Kehinde states,“Everything is political, If I were to paint a bowl of fruit I would be a young, black American male painting a bowl of fruit.” How true. Watch this film, then take this brilliant opportunity to go see Kehinde’s current retrospective called Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, now up at the Brooklyn Museum until May 24th.

Click here to watch the documentary. …

In 2011, Israeli-American filmmaker Eli Hershko made a movie that was ahead of its time. When Carl(a), Hershko’s gritty and deeply human film centered around a trans woman’s journey (played by NYC trans actress Joslyn Defreece) debuted back then, Laverne Cox may have been the costar of the film, but she was certainly not one of Time Magazine‘s “most influential” or Peoples’ “most beautiful”; Kike Arnal‘s book “Bordered Lives: Transgender Portraits from Mexico” was definitely not on fashionable straits’ coffee tables in Greenpoint; and Bruce Jenner was merely braving the sixth level of hell (being in the Kardashian family), not the seventh (patiently enduring a tabloid-scrutinized gender transition). Today, as Time Magazine benevolently informed us in “The Transgender Tipping Point,” if you are a trans person, America will see you now.

In this moment of seismic shift, Hershko and his co-producer (also his beautiful wife) Lilly Cadoch are striking while the iron is hot with an ambitious Indiegogo campaign of guerrilla distribution for their film, one that aims to leverage this surge in trans visibility and popular discourse towards raising money for The National Center for Transgender Equality, while at the same time giving the critically acclaimed but little-known Carl(a) a second chance at life. For a donation of just $10 on Indiegogo, viewers will receive a password and link enabling them to stream the film for a whole week at the end of the campaign, and a large portion of all the money raised goes straight to the NCTE. …