Queer Vulturing
October 30, 2026
See a relaxed Montgomery Clift on Fire Island in classic photo. Queer Catholics haunted by Ratzinger’s anti-gay Halloween letter. Social media algorithms are not being authentic in describing queer relationships. Why you should check out The Bride of Frankenstein for its queer content.
Montgomery Clift’s shorts have something to say
INTO revisits Joe Brainard’s 1975 Monty Clift’s Shorts, drawn from photographs of the actor on Fire Island and now in MoMA’s collection. The piece finds private pleasure and vulnerability in an image too easily swallowed by the standard tragic-star narrative; even a Hollywood legend deserves a day off from being a cautionary tale.
Gay Halloween has reached CNN. There goes the neighborhood.
Ari Shapiro explains the Gay Halloween meme for CNN: the annual ritual in which a costume can require more cultural literacy than a graduate seminar. Finally, national coverage of our commitment to being spectacularly difficult to identify.
Ratzinger’s Halloween fright is still haunting queer Catholics
Forty years after the Vatican’s anti-gay “Halloween Letter,” Emma Cieslik revisits the expulsions, crises of faith and organizing it provoked. DignityUSA’s Marianne Duddy-Burke and New Ways Ministry’s leaders describe damage that didn’t disappear when the church softened its public vocabulary.
From Juilliard fundraising to gay jokes: Jonah Nigh changes the pitch
The gay Asian Jewish adoptee and former opera singer tells OutSmart how a baking competition helped send him toward stand-up—and why he has little patience for comedians punching down. He joins Josh Blue at Punch Line Houston November 19–21; apparently extracting laughs from strangers is its own fundraising challenge.
Fifty years of gay rodeo, with room for more than the Marlboro Man
The Daily Yonder visits New Mexico’s Zia Regional Rodeo, where women can compete in rough-stock events alongside men and newcomers get help learning the ropes. Its reporting follows a circuit shaped by AIDS losses, intergenerational friendships and charity work, with camp events sharing the arena with serious athletic competition.
Your boyfriend? The phone has filed him under ‘best friends’
Patrick Lenton’s Guardian column considers the peculiar invisibility of two men in love, from romantic dinners where nobody clocks the romance to a smartphone that sorts couple pictures as friendship memories. Even the algorithm is doing the old “and his longtime companion” routine.
Zombois sends gay zombies after the graduation-weekend crowd
Fangoria premieres the decidedly adult trailer for Garrett Abdo’s horror-comedy about college seniors whose mountain getaway runs into a mysterious contagion and some very hungry queer undead. The film is still in post-production, so this is a first taste, not a release announcement.
Patrick Stewart’s queer legacy goes well beyond a photo with Ian McKellen
Pride Source remembers Stewart’s public allyship, his friendship with McKellen and gay roles including Sterling in Jeffrey and the dance instructor in Match. The retrospective also addresses his disputed defense of a bakery’s refusal to make a pro-marriage-equality cake, giving the remembrance more substance than a halo and a Starfleet uniform.
Queer horror has opened the crypt. Who’s still outside?
The Daily Bruin traces horror’s queer possibilities from Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein to films confronting homophobia directly. Julia Kinion also asks who benefits from the new visibility, arguing that queer women and people of color still need more room in the genre’s increasingly crowded haunted house.
La Bola Negra gets a review that isn’t ready to hand over every bouquet
OutSmart’s Michael Robinson admires Los Javis’ ambitious, multigenerational engagement with Lorca and queer erasure, but questions the film’s thinly developed present-day protagonist and limited vision of the future. A useful dissent from the awards-season swooning: monumental scope, he argues, doesn’t resolve every dramatic problem.
Two men in love, and the records that almost buried them
Historian Anna Hájková discusses uncovering Ludwig and Paul, a Jewish man and his ethnic German partner who shared a life in Prague before their 1942 arrest. In a WashU interview, she explains how police and trial files can preserve traces of queer lives even when letters and diaries have vanished; her November 9 lecture is also available virtually.
Before I Do packs the Berkshires with exes, friends and Meryl
AwardsWatch talks with director Gary Jaffe and actors Michael Hsu Rosen, Cole Doman and Robin de Jesús about a gay bachelor-weekend ensemble film shot in 12 days. Rekindled feelings, friendship and a Meryl Streep-themed night share the cabin; the interview digs into the cast chemistry that makes all that togetherness work.
Andrew Scott is Leo Reich’s therapist. Please check the boundaries.
Reich’s It Gets Worse follows three twentysomething friends whose eviction sends them into fresh varieties of humiliation, with Scott guesting as a domineering therapist and Zadie Smith providing the narration. Queerty previews the comedy ahead of its six-episode U.S. arrival on Paramount+ November 6; the viral Scott encounter is only part of the damage.
Chris Colfer returns with killer hands and unresolved Glee questions
Colfer talks to Queerty about The Restoration at Grayson Manor, in which his spoiled heir receives experimental bionic hands after a gruesome accident, with Alice Krige supplying the maternal menace. He also discusses the prospect of working with his Glee castmates again without confirming a Kurt comeback; the horror-comedy reaches digital and VOD November 6.
Mo Rocca and Parker Posey have a Hepburn moment
A CBS conversation between Rocca and Posey has queer viewers clamoring for more, especially after he suggests she play Hepburn. Queerty rounds up the response to an interview full of movie knowledge, impressions and easy rapport—the sort of diva scholarship that ought to count toward continuing education.
A photo-booth proposal comes with a return engagement
Troy Gladstone surprises Dyllan Andrew with a ring between photo-booth pictures, and the resulting video has delighted their followers. The lovely wrinkle: Dyllan had already proposed in Switzerland, so Troy is returning the gesture; equal opportunity to ugly-cry for the camera.
Visit the 1969 Stonewall without pretending today’s bar is the same room
A new 3D reconstruction from the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project and Making Gay History uses archival research, photographs and oral histories to recreate the original Stonewall Inn. Queerty explains how to explore the vanished interior, from the coat check to the dance floor—queer history with the floor plan restored.