Gary Needham

Cover of Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression by Jacob Engelberg. The cover features a photograph of a man in a black tank top and a woman in a velvet dress mid-embrace, a second woman in a sequined gown partially obscured by their figures. The photograph is rotated and superimposed upon itself twice across the cover. The title appears in a single line of white text across the center of the image, and the author's name in white text rotated ninety degrees along the bottom right-hand corner.

Save 30% on #NewBook "Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression" by @jacobengelberg.bsky.social, which calls for a bisexual reimagining of queer film studies.
buff.ly/IALTfpW

it's the official publication date for my first book CINEMAS OF BISEXUAL TRANSGRESSION. don't forget you can get 30% off at @dukepress.bsky.social
(dukeupress.edu/cinemas-of-b...) & @mngupbooks.bsky.social
(mngbookshop.co.uk/978147803298...)

… and nothing not in English right? This seems off-brand even for him.

Cliff Raven outside Sunset Strip Tattoo in California shortly after buying it from Lyle Tuttle

A screenshot from https://www.luckyfish.com/cliff-raven-in-chicago-2020 reads: When HIV emerged, studios began refusing homosexual customers, and many gay tattooers left the field. In a letter to Raven, one artist explains feeling relief that police raids closed him down. "I do not fancy working continually with people's BLOOD on my hands in these plague days of anguish and horrible viruses which they... don't know shit about," he says. His community's palpable anxiety bolstered Raven's commitment to providing a medical-grade sterile environment, and it secured him as a beacon to gay men who wanted ink. Pat Fish, the last tattooer trained by Raven, recalls him saying three things are necessary to be a good tattoo artist: art, craft, and morals. Part of having morals meant prioritizing clients' health. "He made me buy an autoclave before he let me buy a tattoo machine," she laughs. This was in 1985. According to her, gloves weren't even industry standard until a doctor led a workshop on it at a tattoo convention in 1986—though Greg James, another tattooer who worked with Raven, says they were slowly becoming common in the early 80s. Raven began wearing them in the late 70s, and he was using an autoclave, the machine hospitals use to sterilize reusable equipment, as early as 1970.

It’s #WorldAIDSDay - Did you know sanitation and barriers are industry standard in tattooing because Cliff Raven, a gay tattooer from Chicago, made sure he could still provide service to his own community as most shops refused to tattoo homosexuals when the AIDS crisis emerged?

queers, Is it just not happening here is it or is that me? Seem to have given up on having a queer life on bluesky. All my people/content still on the insta (meta, I know don't @ me). On Friday convo with Dina Xtravaganza (Angie's daughter, Venus' sister), trans legacies events, fab night's out etc.

& for dessert...My ode to unrated director's cut of Jane Campion's erotic thriller IN THE CUT (2003) in SCREENING ADULT CINEMA, 2nd vol. in @culturalstudies.bsky.social's SCREENING CINEMA series edited by @garyneedham.bsky.social Bon appetit!
@emersonsofilm.bsky.social @scmsadultfilm.bsky.social

One thing with librarians is that they’re acutely aware of *who uses libraries* - many of us might go though our whole adult lives without setting foot in a library, but for people who are a little lost and need somewhere to be, they’re a lifeline.

Event this Friday organized by faculty member Gary Needham! COSME presents "Paris is Burning at 35" in conversation with a legend: Dinah Bons Xtravaganza from NYC's House of Xtravaganza. Limited seating, please reserve a spot using the link below. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/paris-is-b...

check out the bisexuality-related films discussed in my forthcoming book, CINEMAS OF BISEXUAL TRANSGRESSION, here on Letterboxd: boxd.it/LLSt0

100% Hence the screen grab not giving them traffic from a link

Honestly folks it's fine just to talk real shit. Or to understand there's no such thing as small talk, there's learning another person's way of engaging & exchanging social cues, or offering our own cues of listening & kindness on a brief meeting -- nothing small about that.

I was being a touch sarcy there and can, like most of us, do it flawlessly but it is goes in the "high-masking mode activity" category for me. Public transport and queues at the checkout tho' 😮‍💨

Research Symposium: The Cultural Memory of AIDS | Radboud University In this symposium, experts reflect on cultural responses to AIDS through keynotes, a roundtable on memory, and staged readings by Underground Theatre Nijmegen.

If you are in Nijmegen, Netherlands, in December - or can get there!
www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...

IMAGINING TRANS FUTURES Relaxed live conversation on trans academia and politics, including facilitated networking for project sharing (Homotopia 2025: Uprising!)

Join us on Sunday 23rd for "Imagining Trans Futures" with Mijke van der Drift (co-author of Trans Femme Futures) and Deity Evans (trans activist-socialist) - location: Liverpool, Blue Coat gallery. For more info, to book a place, and please, see eventbrite link www.eventbrite.com/e/imagining-...

A headline text that reads "its' incredibly useful why small talk is actually great #autism #neurodivergence

...said no autistic person ever

Hasn't the Pope heard of "Gospel House"?
👇
Barbara Tucker - I Get Lifted (1994)
The Absolute - I Believe - Mark's Full On Gospel Mix (1996)
Dennis Ferrer - How Do I Let Go (2006) ·
etc. etc. etc.

I'm nearly at the end of 12 weeks of 'Queer Film, Video, and Documentary' (a huge 106 students in that class) but they absolutely love Riggs, Dunye, Chocolate Babies, Gregg Bordowtiz, anything AIDS crisis-related, crip theory etc. But, they always really struggle with the end scene of The Living End

This book has been a labor of love! It's Linda Williams' final writing alongside brilliant essays by great scholars, examining the role of melodrama in current life and politics across the globe. Available for pre-order from the always-wonderful @dukepress.bsky.social

Jungle Jump by Patrick Cowley ♨️ an interstellar floor-filler, which pits whirling beats with dub-laced swirls of synth 🪩
“Jungle Jump” has a clammy drum breakdown that draws a line from mid-‘80s Chicago to early ‘90s London. - @andrewryce.bsky.social

🎥 "The Grease Monkeys" (1979)

IMAGINING TRANS FUTURES Relaxed live conversation on trans academia and politics, including facilitated networking for project sharing (Homotopia 2025: Uprising!)

Join us on Sunday 23rd for "Imagining Trans Futures" with Mijke van der Drift (co-author of Trans Femme Futures) and Deity Evans (trans activist-socialist) - location: Liverpool, Blue Coat gallery. For more info, to book a place, and please, see eventbrite link www.eventbrite.com/e/imagining-...

Age yourself with gaming 🎮

A person standing in front of a photograph in a gallery space and giving a talk

Three people standing looking at the camera. The person in the middle is holding a wine glass

A board the describes an exhibition called Residents with a green and red graphic

A red board outside a gallery that includes two portraits of Liverpool trans and queer people

A few pics from the launch for photographer Ming De Nasty's "Residents" project at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery. Part of city-wide arts festival Homotopia. The portrait exhibition captures Liverpool's broad LGBTQAI+ community around politics, identity, and place.

www.homotopia.net/events/resid...

the preface & introduction of my forthcoming book is now freely available to read! & you can also pre-order it at 50% off buff.ly/ehSkevd

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House.

Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity.

They are not the same.

Critical aunty studies: an auntroduction Though aunties are ubiquitous figures across global public cultures, they have received limited scholarly attention. Given the location of these women, femme, and queer figures at the periphery of ...

Great day for this special issue on critical aunty studies.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Can’t help but wonder if I would still be employed right now and, if so, for how long if I hadn’t left my position in Texas in the fall.

Half the background is a purply sheen. The other half features someone standing with another person's arm around their waist and an unclothed limb at the bottom. In the foreground of the lefthand side is the following text: "Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression revitalizes bisexuality screen scholarship by bringing critically deft, contextually rich, politically attuned evidence of its enduring indispensability and expanding urgency for queer media studies...Engelberg deepens our understandings of bisexuality's disruptive power and imaginative potential, while simultaneously staking out innovative theoretical-philosophical pathways and invaluable alliances with feminist, trans, and critical race studies." - Maria San Filippo, author of The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television

The righthand side of the background is a purply sheen. The lefthand side is the face of Sharon Stone playing Catherine in the film Basic Instinct. To her left is the back of a blonde woman wearing a hooped earring. There is text on the righthand side of the image that reads: "Jacob Engelberg addresses an under-researched area in queer cinema studies with an impressive theoretical sophistication. His keen knowledge of film history and generous interventions in queer theory, film theory, and the bisexual film canon make this book the most comprehensive, considered, and thoughtful analysis of bisexuality in visual culture I have encountered. I'm frankly delighted by it." — Maria Pramaggiore, co-editor of Film: A Critical Introduction, 4th edition

Towards the righthand side of the background is a person in a tank top manipulating something in their hands. In front of them is someone with their back turned. The lefthand side of the frame is a purply sheen. The text above it reads: "Jacob Engelberg lets the sexual body breathe.... Delivering new insights into the erotic life of mass culture, this book also reconceives bisexuality...as a tenacious sign of the unknowability of the bodies we crave and those we inhabit, on screen and off. This is a richly textured, subtle, and erudite engagement with the mass cultural archive, and a promising debut from an emerging critical voice, that resounds with a particular clarity and a rangy ambition." — Grace E. Lavery, author of Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

i'm very happy to share these endorsements for my forthcoming book, CINEMAS OF BISEXUAL TRANSGRESSION. it means the world to have such generous words from scholars i respect so deeply.

100% I would also add Clara Law to the "best of" too! I used to teach her Farewell China

It seems to be a curation exclusively from the "Golden Princess Film Production" catalogue which I assume is why there's no Ann Hui. It is a pretty small roster of films from what I remember but includes those John Woo/Tsui Hark big hitters.

a screen grab of a title image, presenting the title "Bi-Coastal" with an outline of the mainland US in an illustration behind it. this floats above a blurry cityscape

a medium close up shot, two white men with dark hair look at each other while one blonde woman looks up at one of them

the front cover of a book with the following text on it. "SCREENING CINEMA. SCREENING ADULT CINEMA. Edited by FARRAH FREIBERT, PETER ALILUNAS, and DESIRAE EMBREE." This text appears over a red background, and beside the editors names is the logo for the publisher Routledge. In the top half of the cover, a brown-skinned person with shaved sides of their head and a nose ring operates a camera.

a screenshot of the first page of a chapter. It reads: 18. BI-COASTAL (1985). Jacob Engelberg. DOI: 10.4324/9781003276302-18. There is a fleeting moment in Linda Williams's influential article "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" in which she references a rapidly proliferating pornographic subgenre. "There is a new category of video called bisexual," Williams announces, before detailing its definitional conventions: "Men do it with women, women do it with men, men do it with men and then all do it with one another, in the process breaking down a fundamental taboo against male-to-male sex." First published in 1991, Williams's article arrived six years after the explosion of a subgenre calling itself bisexual video. Whereas depictions of female bisexuality have been present in straight pornographic films since the earliest days of stag (and continue to this day), depictions of male bisexuality have been fewer. "Bisexual" would thus come to name an industrial category whose sine qua non was the depiction of men having sex with both women and men. This chapter considers one of the formative releases of the early bisexual video boom: Tom DeSimone's Bi-Coastal (1985). The video follows Jill (Cara Lott), who has traveled, bicoastally, from Chicago to Los Angeles to meet her boyfriend Nick (Tico Patterson).

my chapter on one of the first instalments of the 80s bi video boom: BI-COASTAL (1985) is now available! featured in the wonderful SCREENING ADULT FILM, edited by ‪‪@ffreibert.bsky.social‬, Peter Alilunas, & Desirae Embree. ask your library to buy it! www.routledge.com/Screening-Ad...