The Eldorado, the swinging, anything-goes nightspot that gives the new Netflix documentary Eldorado its name, was an LGBTQ haven during Germany’s Weimar Republic, popular among Berlin’s trans population and anyone else who liked to let their hair down in public. It was also, as the film’s subtitle puts it, Everything …
Read More »Legendary Concert Promoter Ron Delsener Looks Back on 60 Years of Live Music Madness
Long before Live Nation, Clear Channel, Ticketmaster, Stubhub, service fees, gold-circle seats, and anything that even resembles the live music industry as we know it today, there was Ron Delsener. The 87-year-old concert promoter has been booking shows in New York City going all the way back to the summer …
Read More »How Hollywood Hid Rock Hudson, Its Biggest Gay Movie Star
Like a lot of all-American dreamboats, Roy Harold Fitzgerald (née Scherer Jr.) made his way to Hollywood after World War II, making good on the offer to look up a friend’s brother should he ever find himself in the greater Los Angeles area. The ex-Navy mechanic had matinee-idol looks, a …
Read More »The Screen Legend That Inspired Cate Blanchett and Jessica Chastain
The cover of Time magazine once proclaimed Liv Ullmann “Hollywood’s new Nordic star,” a designation that never sat well with the Norwegian actress. She was a committed performer, starring in some of Ingmar Bergman’s greatest films of the Sixties and Seventies. She was an accomplished director, with a résumé that …
Read More »The 'National Hero' Who Faked Human Cloning
We revere scientific progress, for the promise it holds for a better life and for the possible future it represents. We also fear that progress, its capacity for transgression in a field that the layperson struggles to understand. The new Netflix documentary King of Clones presents a smart look at …
Read More »'The Stroll': The Black Trans Sex Workers Who Gave New York City Life
Egyptt, Lady P, Ceyenne, Cashmere: they’re all on intimate terms with The Stroll, a strip of 14th Street in the Meatpacking District once popular with Black trans sex workers in pre-yuppified Manhattan. It was a dangerous life; the streetwalkers often didn’t know if they’d be beaten up by the johns …
Read More »They Took Their Daughter to the Hospital and Were Accused of Abuse
There are medical nightmares, and there are legal nightmares. The story at the heart of Take Care of Maya encompasses both. The new Netflix documentary, premiering June 19, presents a damning account of how a sort of hospital-run child abuse/CPS mill allegedly destroyed one family in slow motion, keeping a …
Read More »Mark Ruffalo Calls Out Hollywood's 'Harm' to Native Americans
The new documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States chronicles the Lakota people’s struggle to reclaim the Black Hills, the Native American tribe’s sacred land that was stolen away from them by the U.S. government, who violated a series of treaty agreements with them — including the Fort Laramie Treaty of …
Read More »The Trailblazing Black Astronauts Hidden by History
On June 12th, the Nat Geo documentary The Space Race will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival before dropping later this year on Disney+. Directed by Emmy winner Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Lisa Cortés (Little Richard: I Am Everything), the doc explores the contributions Black people made to NASA …
Read More »He Spent a Decade Trying to Prove His Parents Killed His Teen Sister
We all have issues with our parents, be them related to love, money, neglect or other grievances and wrongdoings, real or imagined. But the story of Stephen Pandos is more extreme than most. He spent a decade trying to prove that his mom and dad were responsible for the unsolved …
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