LGBT

Little Johnny’s Big Gay Adventure

Arches, Glasgow, Thu 10-Sat 12 May

23 Apr 2007

ONE-MAN THEATRE SHOW It’s been 18 months since Johnny McKnight last performed his squirmingly honest solo show at the Arches and things have changed. ‘Thirty’s looming, Madonna’s adopted a black baby and designed a range for H&M, and I’ve been to…

Priscilla, Queen Of Glasgow

Profile

23 Apr 2007

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

9 Apr 2007

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

26 Mar 2007

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)

13 Mar 2007

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)

13 Mar 2007

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)

13 Mar 2007

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)

13 Mar 2007

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

28 Feb 2007

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

28 Feb 2007

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

12 Feb 2007

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?

12 Feb 2007

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

12 Feb 2007

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

29 Jan 2007

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

29 Jan 2007

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

29 Jan 2007

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

15 Jan 2007

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

9 Jan 2007

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’

3 Jan 2007

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

20 Dec 2006

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…

Festive listings

13 Dec 2006

Go to the what's on listings, click 'gay', choose your city and date and marvel at your festive options.

Shortbus - review

Shortbus

27 Nov 2006

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

27 Nov 2006

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…

Gaydar - bar news

Gaydar

27 Nov 2006

The garish but loveable Cuban-themed decor of Habana has been replaced, with a bright style bar interior of cream walls and chunky dark wood furniture. Gone is the elaborate metalwork staircase and balcony, to be replaced by new steps with a toughened…

Mika

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

22 Nov 2006

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…

Shortbus - interview

Real sex in the city

21 Nov 2006

New York City rom-com Shortbus is John Cameron Mitchell’s (writer, director and star of the stage musical and subsequent Sundance Film Festival favourite Hedwig and the Angry Inch) new film. It might sound a rather conventional follow-up to his riotous…

Books for Christmas

21 Nov 2006

Hitlist Butt Book Jop van Bennekom It’s five years since the pink pamphlet Butt first came out of Amsterdam. Defining a literate, visceral, edgy aesthetic - eschewing the waxed, gym-buffed and airbrushed models of glossy mainstream gay mags - it…

A Right Royal Rumpus

Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, Thu 23 Nov

11 Nov 2006

CHARITY CLUB NIGHT Even those who can’t stand her music might have felt a twinge of concern when it was announced that Kylie Minogue had breast cancer, and it’s heartening to hear she’s in remission, out and about, and getting back to normal. Yet…

An Audience with Adrienne

Performer Adrian Howells catches up with his close (some say inseparable) friend, confidante and paragon of domesticity, Adrienne.

26 Oct 2006

Adrian It strikes me that you’ve spent most of your life trying to be somebody you’re not. You’re now 44 and I would have thought that you’d resolved your sense of identity, but it’s clearly not the case. Why do you think this is?

Gaydar

News and events

26 Oct 2006

A new Scottish Executive initiative combating bullying in schools will involve LGBT Youth Scotland, the Edinburgh-based charity that works with young gay people. The Better Futures programme will be run in partnership with the Scottish Association for…

Martha @ Tramway/What Tammy Needs to Know

Tramway / CCA, Glasgow, both runs ended

26 Oct 2006

DANCE & THEATRE Glasgay’s live strand begins with two meditations on the nature of performance: one a more direct essay, and the other reflected through the prism of an homage to a great figure in contemporary dance. Each is warm and appealing, yet…

Diane Torr: Donald Does Dusty

Drag king and performer Diane Torr explains why sh

10 Oct 2006

My brother, growing up in Mastrick on the outskirts of Aberdeen in the late 1950s and early 1960s, aware of his sexuality but with no representation of gay identity in the neighbourhood, focused on Dusty Springfield. It was Dusty and him on the queer…

Hitlist

This fortnight's highlights

10 Oct 2006

Donald Does Dusty Bittersweet tribute to the life of actor, dancer, antiques dealer, property magnate and Dusty Springfield obsessive Donald Torr, who died of AIDS in 1992, by his sister Diane, a performer and drag king herself. CCA, Glasgow, Wed 25-Sat…

Bent Double

10 Oct 2006

Zoe Lyons won the Funny Women competition in 2004, and with residencies in Brighton and London, she’s much in demand. After gaining a degree in psychology she turned to acting, and now finds herself in the even less serious business of comedy. Bent…

Glasgay!

A doubling in funding means three new productions

2 Oct 2006

There’s one event in the Glasgay! 2006 programme that doesn’t quite fit. Graffiti Brasil, a series of photographs of spray painting from the South American country, showing ‘fanatical vandalism’ and ‘jaw-droppingly elaborate murals’, doesn’t seem to…

Gay Against You

2 Oct 2006

POST PUNK The Subway, Edinburgh, Mon 11 Sep What to do with a sparse audience on a soggy Monday night? If you’re electro-saccharine noise terrorists Gay Against You, you drag all 20-odd onstage with you, thus immediately quelling the venue’s…

Scissor Sisters - album review

Scissor Sisters

2 Oct 2006

GLAM ROCK DISCO POP How does one follow an album that sold more than anyone else’s in the UK in 2004 and seamlessly concatenated every genre from 1972 to 1981, short of heavy metal? On Ta-Dah, there are co-writing credits for Bowie’s 70s guitarist…

Glasgay! film season

A selection of fine, exciting (and occasionally un

28 Sep 2006

This year’s programme is strong, and though it lacks the big US names (Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, John Walters) there is still plenty to savour. Check out Argentinean filmmaker Pablo Sofovich’s tale of turkey basters, lesbian parentage and familial farce…

Women's Nights

Velvet and Fur Burger

28 Sep 2006

EDINBURGH WOMEN’S CLUBS Clublife for lady-loving ladies in Edinburgh has been rejuvenated of late, with a change of DJs for both monthly nights Velvet and Fur Burger, a change of venue for the latter, and the addition of regular live performances and…

Gregor Laird: Lost in the Forest

Brunswick Hotel, Glasgow, Sun 1-Sun 29 Oct

28 Sep 2006

NEW ART TALENT Maybe not a sheep, but definitely dressed in wolf’s clothing, young Edinburgh artist Gregor Laird is taking a trip to where the wild things are for his Glasgay! premiere. Piecing together large collage work for his first show since…

Hitlist

The most fabulous events this fortnight

28 Sep 2006

Alan Cumming Not content with producing a cologne and having the brass neck to call it Cumming the Fragrance, the actor and X-Men star returns to Glasgow to talk about his career (which began in a Tron production of Macbeth) as part of the theatre’s…

HIV - The Comeback Tour

All venues, Edinburgh, Glasgow and beyond

18 Sep 2006

HEALTH & RELATIONSHIPS Remember that disease that was big in the 80s? You know - AIDS it was called - all over the telly at the time. They said it would be absolutely massive in the UK, but it never quite happened. You don’t hear much about it now. I…

Rough Cuts

Film news

18 Sep 2006

Rough Cuts would like to dedicate this issue of The List to the memory of Shirley Gilmour (pictured). Gilmour was one of the cornerstones of the Filmhouse throughout the 1990s where her tireless administration of everything from the day to day running…

Gaydar

18 Sep 2006

Glasgay! may not begin in earnest until 14 October, but several exhibitions open this fortnight. In Graffiti Brasil, the country’s spray scene is shown through photographs of works by daredevil pichadores and the internationally renowned Os Gemeos…

Echo Park LA

18 Sep 2006

Tony Richardson/Shelagh Delaney’s 1961 drama A Taste of Honey is the direct inspiration for this beautifully composed teenage drama. Young Latina Magdalena (Emily Rios) is blissfully preparing for her Quinceañera (15th birthday celebration) dreaming of…

The Truman Capote Talk Show

Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Tue 12-Sat 16 Sep

1 Sep 2006

THEATRE In Murder By Death, the daft 1976 spoof whodunnit based on a Neil Simon screenplay, five sleuths arrive at the mansion of eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain. He plans dinner, and then a murder, which they must solve. Aided (and hampered) by…