The theme for this year’s New York City LGBTQ film festival NewFest is “queer film is an act of rebellion.”
“We are in a moment when we need to be raising our voices,” the festival’s executive director David Hatkoff tells me ahead of the fest’s opening tonight. “We need to be making our presence known. We need to be telling the world and those who would like to marginalize us or erase us entirely that we’re not going anywhere…I think what festivals like NewFest do is create a space where people can be in community, be reminded that they are part of something bigger than themselves and even experience joy as an act of rebellion.”
One film that certainly presents unapologetic queer storytelling is “Fucktoys.” The NSFW John Waters-esque dark comedy from writer and director Annapurna Sriram follows a stripper and sex worker (Sriram) in a fictional locale called Trashtown as she tries to come up with $1,000 to pay a tarot card reader (Big Freedia) to help rid her of a mysterious curse.
“I feel like it personifies the spirit of ‘queer film is an act of rebellion’ so beautifully,” Hatkoff says. “We can march in the streets but we can also get 500 queer folks in a room to laugh their asses off at an absolutely riotous film like ‘Fucktoys.’ The laughter that is going to be echoing through the walls of the SVA theater on Friday night, that is rebellion.”
In the film, “13 Reasons Why” star Brandon Flynn plays an actor working in the area who hires a trans male sex worker (Sadie Scott) for an afternoon of kinky delights.
Flynn’s scenes are not for prudish pearl-clutchers. At one point, he’s shown being fisted while wearing a rubber jockstrap and a gold-painted penis extender.
His character’s name is – get ready for it! – James Francone. “It obviously brings up some familiar names in the industry, but he’s really an amalgamation of a couple actors that I pulled from in crafting him,” Flynn says. “One of these actors had starred in a movie that was kind of autobiographical for him, and he said in an interview how the character he was playing had a bigger appendage than he did. So he basically wore like an extender so that he could feel like he had a bigger one. I was like, ‘That is actually perfectly insane.’”
As for the fisting sequence, Flynn explains he relishes going out of his comfort zone to discover and embrace unexpected performances. But, more simply, he says he knows of well-known actors who are into kinky play. “I happen to know plenty of sex workers who have had to sign NDAs for very high-profile clients,” Flynn says. “I think it was an interesting and truthful element to the story that Annapurna was telling, which is that there are these hypocrisies and dual worlds and infrastructures and systems that are constantly in friction with each other.”
Sadie Scott and Brandon Flynn in “Fucktoys.”
In the works for Flynn is starring as James Dean in “Willy and Jimmy Dean,” a biopic about the icon’s supposed gay college romance with William Bast. Written and to be directed by Guy Guido, the film is based on Bast’s 2006 memoir, “Surviving James Dean.”
While rumors of Dean being more fluid than not have persisted since his untimely death at just age 24 in 1955, Flynn doesn’t mince words when asked why it’s taken so long for his queer life to be tackled in a movie. “The short answer is I just think the whole world is just so fucking homophobic,” Flynn says. “He really became the ideal masculine icon. Like hardcore, James Dean is what a real man is. But he was also emotional. I think that shakes people, especially people’s fragile heterosexuality. I think it’s important that we reveal these stories because Jimmy wasn’t the only one.”
Flynn has been openly gay for most – if not, all – of his career. “I can’t imagine living any other way,” he says. “I’m proud to be an out actor and I’ll sing it from the rooftops. There’s a legacy about it and a responsibility about it”
NewFest runs Oct. 9-21 in New York City and online.
