THE BOY FROM OZ (1995)
Peter Allen was overshadowed in life by the mega-famous company that he kept, such as best friend Judy Garland, who considered him a protégé, and his ex-wife, Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli. When Peter won his Oscar for “Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do)”, he shared it with two legendary songwriters - Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager – as well as Christopher Cross, still a hot star at the time from his huge 1979 hit “Sailing”.

COMMON THREADS, STORIES FROM THE QUILT (1989)
The interviews are gripping. Five people speak of their experiences watching a loved one die of AIDS. Three of the deceased are gay men, one is a heterosexual man, the other a hemophiliac child. Good choices, which reflect the demographic spread of the disease in the 1980s. The interviewees - lovers and parents - talk from the heart, and their stories are supremely compelling.

DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2006)
I always had a soft spot for the Catholic Church, as it seemed so fabulous and gothic compared to the drab Anglican services my Mother dragged me to on Sunday mornings during my glum boyhood in a farming town in rural New South Wales. Even out of church, the town's Catholics were uniformly wealthier than other townsfolk, sending their children to a private Catholic school and communing in exclusive social caches.

I'M GOING TO TELL YOU A SECRET (2005)
Madonna's 2003 album "American Life" seemed to reflect a mid-life crisis, forcing airy pop melodies into a shotgun wedding with angry techno polemics, and its critical and commercial failure was laid squarely at the feet of her growing seriousness. Was Madonna going to become so humorless she'd lose her greatest creation, her self, and was it all Kabbalah's fault? For some, all worship and no play was making Madonna a very dull girl.

PAPER DOLLS (2006)
Israel closed its borders to Palestinian workers after the rise of the second intifada in 2000, and immediately sought itinerant workers from other countries. Paper Dolls documents a group of pre-op Filipino transexuals who moved to Israel to work as carers for elderly and infirm othodox Jews.

PARAGRAPH 175 (2000)
In Weimar Germany, when Berlin was known throughout the world as a "gay Eden" the law was rarely deployed, and there was expectations it would be reformed or just forgotten. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, Paragraph 175 began to be more strictly enforced. After the Night of the Long Knives in 1935, when Ernst Roem, Hitler's confidant and head of the SA who was said to be gay, the persecution of homosexuals began in earnest, including the deportation of around one hundred thousnad homosexual men to concentration camps where they reportedly sat on the lowest social rung, beneath Russian POWS and even Jews.

ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES (1992)
Watching other people's home movies generally sucks - no matter their content, you can never fully appreciate what they hold if you're not in them or if you aren't intimately acquainted with their cast, crew and locations.

SILVERLAKE LIFE (1993)
There are mindblowing moments, such as Mark’s wistful retelling of his doctor’s description of cerebral toxoplasmosis as a legion of tiny bats slowly eating your brain from the stem base up. In another scene, a hotel manager asks Tom to put his shirt back on if he’s going to swim in the pool, as his dozens of angry KS lesions are unsettling the other guests. As the movie progresses, Mark becomes increasingly sick, and is bedridden, shockingly emaciated and semi-comatose for most of the third act.

TYING THE KNOT (2004)
Dr. Martin Luther King's observation that races don't fall in love with each other, individuals do, technically addresses objections that genders don't fall in love with each oother, individuals do, but it wipes out the myriad of differences between the African American experience and the gay and lesbian experience.

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