Jim Kepner: Jim Kepner was founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives, and co-founder of ONE Institute. A major pioneer of the Gay movement as well as a founder of Gay Studies, he died in 1997. His most recent book is ROUGH NEWS, DARING VIEWS: PIONEER GAY PRESS JOURNALISM IN THE 1950S, published by Haworth Press.
This book should have been subtitled “a spiteful biography.” Landis, first winning the reader's sympathy by a credible-seeming job on the film-maker's childhood in Hollywood, is out for blood.
On September 21,1982, Kenneth Anger had walked out on a scheduled reading at New York's Danceteria disco, complaining that the place was too sleazy and the music much too loud. Landis, a DJ who'd arranged the event, swore to get even. He has put a lot of work here into making Anger seem vicious, diabolical, insane. Anger, almost the inventor of experimental or underground film, dealt with homosexual themes with amazing frankness for the time in his classic underground films,
Anger, now living in Palm Springs, deserves a less malevolent and trustworthy biography. . . . His collected films are available in a boxed video set, The Magic Lantern Cycle, and are often featured at Gay and Lesbian film festivals, and his expose volume, Hollywood Babylon, has gone through several popular revisions.
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