by Caden Mark Gardner
A new repertory screening series at the Museum of Modern Art, unabashedly titled “Now We Think as We Fuck”: Queer Liberation to Activism, is daring and necessary. While being fully comprehensive within a relatively tight timeframe is impossible, the program charts underground and arthouse filmmaking from the pre-Stonewall era through gay liberation, the AIDS crisis, and New Queer Cinema. Such films are important for reconciling how much of queer film history is as tied to pornography and erotica as it is to activism. The title comes from a quote in Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs’s landmark 1989 documentary on life at the intersection of queerness and blackness.
The earliest films in the series are from the late 1960s, featuring the likes of Kenneth Anger (already a cemented icon of the American avant-garde) and Andy Warhol (already an avatar of underground cinema). Queer desire, fetish, and sex are laid bare in films like Warren Sonbert’s Amphetamine and Avery Willard’s Leather Narcissus. Portrait of Jason, Shirley Clarke’s groundbreaking profile of African American gay hustler Jason Holliday, functions in conversation with these works. The film’s simplicity, letting its subject directly tell the camera his debauched stories, makes it compulsively compelling, but its undercurrent of neuroticism and sadness has not been lost on critics (nor has the fact that it was made by a straight white director). Read more via Hyperallergic
Portrait of Jason (1967)