Plainclothes

Lucas and Andrew

“Pretty policemen” is what they used to call the cops who entrapped gay men in public toilets. Tom Blyth plays one in Plainclothes, an old-school gay movie in many respects, set in the 1990s and all about the trials of the closeted homosexual man. It’s intimate – human-emotions intimate rather than body-parts intimate – and if I say that Blyth’s undercover cop Lucas spends his days luring unsuspecting homosexuals into toilets, where they are apprehended once in a compromising situation, you will probably say “and then one day he falls for one of the men he’s meant to entrap”. That is exactly what happens. And it is more or less the entire story. … Read more

Looking

Agustín and Patrick sit on a hillside

2016’s Looking is also known as Looking: The Movie, for reasons that are obvious if you were a fan of the TV show that suddenly got pulled just as everyone involved was gearing up for a third season. Looking: The Movie is HBO’s sop to the fans who bombarded the company with howling letters of complaint, and a neat way for showrunner Michael Lannan and creative sidekick/writer/director Andrew Haigh to tie off various loose ends. This they do. The original idea for the series was Queer as Folk meets Tales of the City – a look at gay/queer (though “gay” is the word most used here) life as it’s lived by people who … Read more