Collected by Inkplum, more Tadzio soon

Any idea what the title of the film is?

Um… turn off the sound ;)

From Peggy Rajski comes a powerful and disturbing story that handles the concepts of coming out of the closet and suicide with wry humour and pathos.

His MySpace Profile | His Stickam Profile

Long known as a hub for electronic and comic geeks, Tokyo’s Akihabara district is now a battleground for role-play based maid cafes. In the latest twist to popular maid cafes, Japanese boys cross-dress and fill in for women to serve the patrons.

“Bakabakashii” is how maids in this unique troupe explain its appeal.That means silly. Hibaritei features “maids” who are men. In Akihabara, it’s common to see men dressed as maids or their favorite anime characters, but this trend has reached new heights with the launch of cross-dressing maid troupe Hibaritei. In a twist, the cross-dressing maids are all weekday salarymen who are straight, most having girlfriends. These men are not financially troubled in any way. Most work in IT companies and come to Akiba often because of work.

Read on…

Matthew Lush, self-styled GayGod and one of YouTube’s wannabe-stars, was happy to laugh about some sort of strip video made by Chris Crocker which was leaked to xTube a while ago.

Someone should teach him something about karma… GayGod has his own “Sextape Exposed!”-scandal now ;o) You’ll find the details here. They have uploaded the video to MegaUpload but it was removed almost immediately. If you want to see him jerk off really bad… try 7chan (see comments under this post).

Since unleashing his outrageous debut No Skin Off My Ass in ‘91 and with successive art-porn assaults such as Hustler White and The Raspberry Reich in his filmography, Bruce LaBruce has gained international notoriety as the enfant terrible of Canadian gay cinema - a reputation that now encompasses horror, with his latest:

Otto; or, Up with Dead People

The awkwardly punctuated title (a nod to Herman Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre; or, the Ambiguities) refers to the two films within the film. The first one “Otto,” is a documentary about a boy who may or may not be a zombie. The second, “Up with Dead People” is a political zombie porno flick. Both films are directed by an avant-garde lesbian filmmaker character named Medea Yarn (an anagram for legendary experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, 1917-61).

Un-death is only the beginning of Otto’s identity crisis, however, as he’s also a zombie with an eating disorder. As a vegetarian in his previous life, he abbors consuming human flesh. Instead, he sustains himself on a predominantly roadkill diet. As an effiminate, vegetarian, gay zombie, Otto is particularly vulnerable to his human enemies, so in order to stay under the radar, he auditions for a role in “Up with Dead People” in the hopes that people won’t think he’s a genuine zombie, they’ll just think he’s playing one.

LaBruce exploits the zombie subgenre not merely as a convenient metaphor to comment on contemporary consumerism but to tackle issues very specific to contemporary gay culture. “the old horror monsters like vampires and werewolves, they’re more like individuals,” he explains “They’re on the fringe of society. They’re marginalized characters. But zombies are the ultimate conformist. They come in masses and they’re the ultimate consumers. Part of the thesis of the movie is that gays are now model consumers. Gay culture has become extremely conformist; gays are getting married and having children and they’re very upwardly mobile and bourgeois. But the zombie template fits AIDS as well because AIDS is viral. It’s the idea of the body decaying, and I’m shifting the paradigm so my zombie is the outsider, and, just as in Night of the Living Dead, where the rednecks are beating and burning the zombies, that’s essentially what has happened to homosexuals as well.”

LaBruce is confident that his traditional audience will accept his foray into horror, firmly convinced that “gays are very much into blood and guts.” But it’s the mainstream horror fans he’s more worried about. “They’re able to watch the most extreme torture porn and decapitation disembowelments, but then if they see two men kissing they’ll puke,” he says with a laugh “That’s what I’m expecting. One of my initial impetuses was I thought it would be really cool to make a zombie porn movie, partly because zombies are so rotten that you can just make your own orifice so it’s perfect for pornography.”

   

And people should learn how to hold their camera phones… really!