Film

Continuing the series of films using voice recordings, this time we have AIDS: The Unheard Tapes, a three-episode documentary that presents voice recordings from men with HIV during the 80s and 90s. What stands out about Unheard Tapes is the use of actors to lip-sync the recordings, giving a more rounded idea of the person behind each voice. In a topic that is frequently told by those who survived years following the outbreak, it is special to find material of those struggling with the virus at that time, with the information they had available, inner struggles, weird alternative remedies, and hopes.

A long time has passed since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, to the point that it is hard to imagine the level of devastation it inflicted on the gay communities. The Unheard Tapes brings back, for a moment, the complex humanity of those often remembered as a number or a name. 

We have been tracking Trade Center, Adam Baran’s short film recounting the stories of 5 guys who cruised in New York’s World Trade Center during the 80’s and 90’s, and we found that it is based on “Towers of Cum”, a text written by Todd Verow that is part of the film The End Of Cruising. If you have followed our series The Darkroom Review, you might know that we believe the grim state of gay apps in 2026 is unintentionally helping to grow the interest in real-life events, and tangentially, cruising. What we have experienced in the Netherlands is not even close to what we used to have when we grew up in Bogota, or what we have seen in Medellin or even Paris. Yet, something in the air is changing, and rather than calling for the end of cruising, the question should be what form cruising will have in a time of constant technological mediation and performance. 

Anyways, here is a YouTube video (link??) of Towers of Cum (needs logging in), while we keep looking for Trade Center.

We are not very knowledgeable about Kenneth Anger’s work. To us, he is an old reference point for homoerotic imagery that has been filtered through multiple reinterpretations, giving his work a mixed feeling of familiarity and avant-garde. An almost classical homoerotism that uses symbolism as a language tool that, for the Instagram brain, is quite the trip. 

Yet, what we did not know was that Fireworks was directed by a 20-year-old Anger, who also happened to be the main actor -the guy who gets his ass kicked. Besides, he was very influenced by the philosophical ideas of Aleister Crowley, a hugely influential occultist figure, which explains why Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, is not about the actual Christian idea of Lucifer. In that sense, Fireworks could be seen as a transformative journey of death towards self-knowledge or liberation.

There is an increasing discourse about young filmmakers being “discovered” on YouTube, either to save Hollywood or social media as a whole, which makes us wonder: who are the twenty-something artists making experimental homoerotic cinema today?!

Many interpretations of this short film see a tale of a black bodybuilder falling in love with a magical creature (merman) as an allegory of queer love. However, we see it the other way, a fantastical creature captivated by a human, and the sacrifices that said creature is willing to make to be their eyes.