LGBT

Priscilla, Queen Of Glasgow

Profile

What’s this all about? In the very best Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert tradition, Glasgow’s bonniest lassies (well ten of them and don’t check their birth certificates) will go breast-to-fake-breast to duke it out for the title of…

Trashed

Cruz, Edinburgh, Sat 21 Apr

CLUB NIGHT (From left: Morgan, Jon Pleased Wimmin, Slim Boy Fat and Lick It) It is handy that Edinburgh’s gay and gay-friendly clubs, bars and general venues of debauchery are clustered around the Leith Walk area. This means that starting the…

Gaydar

Not long after club night Velvet closed its doors in the wee small hours of Sunday 4 February, a fire broke out at the venue, Mariners, in Leith, and destroyed the interior. The inferno was so intense the roof fell in. Alas, the next week’s gay club…

Neil Bartlett

Skin Lane (Serpent’s Tail)

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER Author and theatre director Neil Bartlett explores the link between repressed sexual desire and social envy in this disappointing follow-up novel to the Whitbread-shortlisted Mr Clive and Mr Page. London, 1967. Mr F is a…

Rhona Cameron

The Naked Drinking Club (Ebury)

AUSTRALIAN ADVENTURE In 1979, the chronicle of a year in Cameron’s teenage life, she’s an adopted Lothians lassie who fixates on girls, lets the boys take advantage of her, and watches her father die. In her first novel, The Naked Drinking Club, the…

Augusten Burroughs

Possible Side Effects (Atlantic Books)

SHORT STORIES It’s queerly satisfying to know that other gay men lead equally uninspiring and uninspired lives, where mopping up dog pee, checking on eBay bids and having bad dates are the highlights of the day. Augusten Burroughs’ new book, a…

Will Davis

My Side of the Story (Bloomsbury)

COMING-OF-AGE TALE The horror, uncertainty and exasperation of being a teenager are supposed to be character-building. And so the horror of coming out, the uncertainty of running away to Brighton on a binge of pills and powder, and the…

Zeus

Mariners, Edinburgh, Sat 10 Mar

CLUB NIGHT While some clubs wind down due to changing tastes, and others change venue in an attempt to rejuvenate, one Edinburgh club is expanding its remit, with a new night aimed at the boys. Velvet, based at Mariners (a classy banqueting…

Gayharhar

In this fortnight’s hamper of homo-friendly delicacies at the Glasgow Comedy Festival (Thu 8 Mar - Sat 24 Mar) sit such shrink-wrapped Scottish favourites as Craig Hill and Karen Dunbar, alongside extra-matured, expensive import Joan Rivers, and new…

Gay movie round-up

Gay screen

The Glasgow Film Festival programmes five films with a queer bent this year. It’s unbearably hot in The Wayward Cloud, where Taiwan’s heatwave causes the sales of watermelons to shoot up. Hsiao-Kang tries to hide the fact that he’s a porn actor from…

Patrick Wolf

Do you believe in magic?

Vicious little Dorothy Parker got it right when she said that the term ‘artist’ is overused, and that the category of ‘art’ is not elastic. It isn’t fashionable to say this, of course, where a restrictive version of ‘inclusion’ has meant that we can all…

Out of the Bedroom - Out of the Closet

The Canon’s Gait, Edinburgh, Tue 20 Feb

MUSIC The acoustic musician is a sensitive soul, and according to James Whyte, who runs the Out of the Bedroom open mic nights, not all of them are writing love songs about the opposite sex. ‘Quite a lot of the regular performers at Out of the…

LGBT History Month

Back to the future

Love and life for LGBT people in the UK is looking a particularly rosy shade of pink in 2007. Civil partnerships have failed to wreck the institution of marriage, same-sex couples have the legal right to adopt children jointly, and the Equality Bill…

* Hitlist - LGBT History Month

Hitlist

The Celluloid Closet A history of homo Hollywood, as told in this 1995 film based on Vito Russo’s book. From secretly gay actors like Rock Hudson (pictured, in Pillow Talk, where he played a straight man pretending to be gay to charm Doris Day’s…

Rainbow faith

The open-minded Metropolitan Community Church congregation bring history into their regular service this month, discussing queer heroes in the Bible, the MCC’s formation, spirituality and sexuality. A special inter-faith event will be held on Sun 25…

Fit for 2007

All venues, all year, times vary

HEALTH AND WELLBEING As I write, the sun kisses rain-damp pavements outside my window, but it’s likely to be only a respite in a month of cashless gloom and bad weather-induced misery. Indeed, University of Cardiff psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall…

Various, The Book of Boy Trouble - comic review

Various artists

GAY Edited by two of its contributors, Robert Kirby and David Kelly, The Book of Boy Trouble brings together selected highlights of the first ten years of the alternative fanzine of the same title (minus the ‘book’ bit). It’s a collection whose…

Preview of the year 2007

2007 is about the future. And about the past. It’

THE FUTURE Cyberspace invaders We may not be flying around in hover cars or wearing spangly all-silver outfits, but thanks to the internet the future has truly arrived. And the revolution will continue apace in 2007, argues Suzanne Black. A…

Bildwechsel - feminist film collective

Bildwechsel

FEMINIST FILM COLLECTIVE A Hungarian lesbian-transgender Western and the recurrent story of two Lebanese lesbians are the highlights of the latest Bildwechsel screening night, showing short films and celluloid vignettes involving women from all…

Shortbus - review

Shortbus

GRAPHIC ROMANCE Part love letter to New York and part exploration of the birth, sustenance and death of intimate relationships, Shortbus is replete with graphic, unsimulated scenes of all combinations: men, women, men and women, threesomes, group…

Shortbus

Part love letter to New York and part exploration of the birth, sustenance and death of intimate relationships, Shortbus is replete with graphic, unsimulated scenes of all combinations: men, women, men and women, threesomes, group sex. But unlike…

Mika

Nice'n'Sleazy, Glasgow, Fri 17 Nov 6

POP First mentioned in the same places as fellow quirk-pop doyens Lily Allen and The Pipettes, it’s unlikely that the Beirut-born, London-raised Mika will be playing many more venues as intimate as Sleazy’s. As he played here, he was also making his…