Every week, The GLAAD Wrap brings you LGBT-related entertainment news highlights, fresh stuff to watch out for, and fun diversions to help you kick off the weekend.
1) The James Franco and Travis Mathews film Interior. Leather Bar. from Strand Releasing opened on January 2 in Los Angeles and will be rolling out to more cities this month. The film re-imagines and dramatizes the highly explicit material (as rumor has it) cut from the final version of the controversial 1980 film Cruising, starring Al Pacino. Interior. Leather Bar. Val Lauren stars as an actor forced to negotiate his own boundaries in the film within a film.
2) HBO announced this week that Ryan Murphy's highly anticipated movie adaptation of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart will premiere on the network in May. That month, the network will also debut the documentary film Larry Kramer about Kramer's work as an LGBT advocate and co-founder of AIDS advocacy group ACT UP. On June 8, HBO will premiere The Case Against 8 which takes an inside look at the Supreme Court case that overturned California's Proposition 8 last year.
3) The Athena Film Festival, which honors extraordinary women in film and showcases films which address women in leadership, has announced the lineup for the 2014 festival running February 6-9 in New York. LGBT-inclusive films screening during the festival include the comedy The Hot Flashes, the drama Reaching for the Moon and the documentaries The Other Shore, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley and Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth. Tickets are available now.
4) Originally released as a web series, Jinkx Monsoon's Drag Becomes Him will become a full length documentary this summer. This behind the scenes foray will be expanded to include additional footage and be cut as an entirely new edit. Monsoon, who recently wrapped a successful run of The Vaudevillians, performed at the 24th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco this past May, and will appear in an upcoming episode of CBS' Blue Bloods.
5) Sense8, the new Netflix sci-fi drama from trans creator Lana Wachowski and her brother Andy, will focus on eight people around the world connected by a violent shared vision. Each of the season's 10 episodes will focus on one character's story as one entity tries to bring the eight together and another tries to kill them. The as-yet uncast characters will include a closeted Mexican telenovela leading man and a transgender American blogger, Sense8 starts shooting in June.
6) The hit British drama Mr. Selfridge features Frances O'Connor as Rose, a woman who leaves her cheating husband (Jeremy Piven) for a woman named Delphine (Polly Walker). The series' second season just premiered on ITV in Britain this week and PBS has announced it will begin airing the series in the U.S. later this year.
7) Good news for those stuck inside due to cold weather! The final novel in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series will be published on January 21. The Days of Anna Madrigal, the ninth book of the series, will follow the long-beloved title character (a now 92-year-old trans woman) as she travels from her home in San Francisco to the world famous Burning Man festival.
8) Desert Migration, a documentary film about long term HIV/AIDS survivors living in Southern California, is looking for funding help to finish their film and cover postproduction expenses. Desert Migration looks at how resilient the human spirit is and questions our approach to aging and the idea of our own mortality as these survivors pass 50 years old. Check out the Desert Migration trailer below and learn more at their Indiegogo page.