Officially, this is day two of the 18th annual Inside Out Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival, but it's the first fully-programmed day, with 8 different screenings happening. And things are starting off with a bang! There are so many cool screenings going on today you're actually spoiled for choice. The big ticket is undoubtedly Shelter (pictured), which has already generated a significant amount of buzz on the prissy, reactionary gay blogs.......

Gay movies get a bad rap. Even some of the most avowed homosexualists we know cringe at the thought of curling up in front of anything other than Brokeback Mountain, or possibly The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Well, the mouthful that is the Inside Out Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival is doing everything it can to change that. The festival, which opens its 18th season tonight, showcases films......

Sex and the City is all over the place. Lead character Carrie's draped on the side of a Yorkville building accompanied by the worst tagline ever: "Get Carried away." Groan. Kim Cattrall is here, here, and here in reruns going over stuff she'd already mentioned when the show ended: yes, you're right to get paid more; no, you're not anything like Samantha; and, maybe, we'll forget that you wrote a sex book. On the radio,......

Photo by wili_hybrid. There is little more dreadful for a parent than unintentionally hurting one's own child. There is little more traumatic for a child than having something they dearly want taken away from them. A Toronto psychologist is under fire for recommending controversial treatments which some believe cause just that. A heartbreaking NPR documentary released this week tells the story of two families struggling with the gender identities of their children. "Bradley" is......

Is anyone else sick of those borderline-offensive Canadian Club ads they've been running in NOW lately? Based on the strange notion that thinking about your parents having sex will make you want to buy things, the whiskey's "Damn Right" campaign tries to create nostalgia for the fatherly masculinity of yesteryear. They use "vintage" photos and the grammatically invincible tagline "DAMN RIGHT YOUR DAD DRANK IT" as a rallying cry for some kind of boozy......

Happy: A Very Gay Little Musical is the latest show to open at Buddies and also the first musical by Sky Gilbert the theatre has produced in 17 years. And what a tricky little number it is. Essentially a musical about people writing a musical about people writing a musical, Happy tells the story of Bob and Dave, a married gay couple writing a musical about themselves, and Sue, Bob's dramaturg/faghag extraordinaire. Some scenes......

Well, the snow has melted, which means it must be about time for Factory to remount another George F. Walker show. This year, it's 1974's Beyond Mozambique, which hasn't been performed by Factory in thirty years. As the title implies, this early piece by the seminal Canadian playwright is many miles away from more popular, recent Walker plays, such as the Suburban Motel and East End Plays cycles, which typically focus on working-class Torontonians......

If you're feeling like it's been a while since your last dose of post-punk, queer, feminist culture, then you'll be happy to hear that this Wednesday, The Power Plant (Toronto's leading contemporary art gallery) will have your fix. They'll be screening selections from the oeuvre of avant-garde, DIY filmmaker Sadie Benning. Benning, who was one of the founding members of the seminal band Le Tigre, made her first film at the tender age of fifteen,......

You really have to wonder how performance artist and sexual activist Louise Bak always manages to schedule the very best mix of the Toronto literary scene for her Box Salon series. The successful poet and CIUT "Sex City" host founded the event back in 1998, and a decade later it is still the most entertaining literary night out in Toronto. While many other reading series can be hit or miss, the Box is consistently fresh,......

Today is a Valentine's Day that Kathleen Wynne will never forget. The Miss G___ Project is encouraging Ontario residents to contact the current Minister of Education today and politely demand that a Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) program be added to the Ontario Secondary School curriculum. The Miss G___ Project for Equity in Education has been fighting for three years for a WGS program in Ontario high schools. Kathleen Wynne called the project "the most......

Forget Harlequin––the results from NOW's massive love and sex survey are now out. It's got all the usual features of the Love and Sex issue, like a front cover (at left) that'll make prudes just as mildly uncomfortable as the usual back American Apparel ad will, and tons of glorious, glorious data, this year from just under 6,000 respondents. Among the salient points from the forty questions: we are getting gayer ("sexual fluidity is on......

Reg Hartt, everyone's favourite dude with a movie theatre in his basement, is promoting the new(ish) film version of off-Broadway tittilator Naked Boys Singing by screening a mini Queer Film Festival at the Cineforum over the next few weeks. Each Thursday night for the next four weeks, he'll screen Naked Boys (which is exactly what it sounds like) at 9, with a different gay movie as a lead-in at 7. While the main attraction......

This is probably not the issue these signs are trying to address. Photos taken by Jonathan Goldsbie at Innis College's men's washroom.......

Renda Abdo knew that she'd have some explaining to do about calling her boutique nightclub, located in the north end of the Village, "Straight." The name was ambiguous. Was Straight exclusive to straights? (Imagine if "Gay" opened in the middle of club district.) Or did it mock them? Straight was a response, Abdo explains, to the attitude that the Village had become irrelevant, a view laid out in a front page Star article with......

As the popular phrase goes, when one video store door slams shut, another one opens. A new video store has sprung up on Dundas (just west of Dufferin) catering to "women and the LGBT community." The store––called West Side Stories––has a broad selection of old and new queer/transgender movies and documentaries, as well as a section for "women in film" alongside the usual array of new releases and cult classics. It's encouraging to note that......

Kincardine-born, Mississauga-bred, Toronto-based, and Berlin-bound, Joel Gibb is the musical and managerial head of The Hidden Cameras, the fantastic and always well-populated music collective whose members have included Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), Reg Vermue (Gentlemen Reg), Laura Barrett, Maggie MacDonald (Republic of Safety), Dave Meslin (founder of the Toronto Public Space Committee), Bob Wiseman, Steve Kado (founder of Blocks Recording Club, member of Barcelona Pavilion and Ninja High School), Ohad Benchetrit (Do Make Say......

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. Even before November's provincial election, Kathleen Wynne was a force to be reckoned with. As the Liberal Education Minister,......

It used to be that as sure as you could count on awkward conversations at the office Christmas party and a stocking full of clementines on Christmas morning, you could count on being able to turn your TV to channel 11 on Christmas Eve to see a certain Bing Crosby vehicle featuring the best-selling single of all time: White Christmas. While channel 11 (it's certainly not CHCH anymore...what is it?) has given up its......

Hannah Moscovitch's play East of Berlin is familiar territory for Tarragon's extra space. Remember Rosa Laborde's Léo, which was remounted last season? Well, here's another show in the same space that's set in South America, has political subject matter, spans the life of its main character, and features only two other actors, a man and a woman, both of whom he has sex with. This may be a bit of a tangent, but Torontoist......

If you've watched Global at all recently, you've probably seen the promos for their new series Da Kink in My Hair, which premieres tomorrow night, October 14 at 7:30 p.m. The show is being billed as a sitcom, but that's not actually the most accurate description. It's a funny show set mainly inside a West Indian hair salon in Toronto called Letty's, which sounds like it could be a very sitcom-ish premise, but it's......

We have a new hero. And it's whoever wrote this craigslist post. See, this person found a lost wallet belonging to one Simon "Pee-Pee" Harris (this name is apparently a convoluted code, which we don't understand—and if you do, that means you're probably Pee-Pee, and our readership is broader than we ever imagined). Anyway, the wallet-finder wasn't exactly thrilled with the evidence of Pee-Pee's sketchy professional life and questionable extracurricular activities. But it wasn't......

As long as there have been cowboys, there have been gay cowboys. Now that we consider it, Torontoist isn't sure there are any real cowboys any more (well, other than those ones). But if living in Toronto teaches you only one thing, it's that there are gays; gays who want their dress-up parties. This Thursday marks the second appearance of the amazingly-named Steers and Queers, a quarterly queer country night at the Dakota Tavern.......

Photo of Julie Doiron courtesy of Jagjaguwar. Feminism means different things to different people—and for many people it means something negative. From the angry feminist stereotypes to news outlets simply ignoring it, feminism is an important movement that's gotten a bad rap. Ladyfest Toronto is aiming to change that by throwing a festival that proves feminism can be both fun and political. The festival kicks off next Thursday (the 27th) with a party at......

Canada's first same-sex marriage was performed here, and according to 2006 census data released today, nearly a quarter of same-sex common law couples in Toronto have officially tied the knot. Strangely enough, hetero marriages haven't crumbled en masse since the unions became legal country-wide in 2005, nor have people started lobbying to marry their pets. Someone should tell the Americans. This is the first time that the question was asked on a census, with 7,465......

Last night, the seats of Harbourfront Centre's studio theatre were packed with a mix of middle-aged art aficionados and well-coiffed hip, young homos all dying to see Francesco Vezzoli give a lecture and screen his notorious Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula. Vezzoli is an Italian artist known for his work in video and embroidery (yes, embroidery) who set the art world ablaze a couple of years ago with his re-imagining of the......

On August 22nd, Leonardo Zuniga held a press conference in the Council Chambers of City Hall, where representatives of community organizations including the Toronto Youth Cabinet, No One Is Illegal, and the Metropolitan Community Church urged Minister of Immigration Diane Finley to grant Leo refugee status in Canada, a decision that could potentially save his life. Leo came to Canada in September of 2004 in search of a place to live where he would......

Nelly Boy is the story of of Nelson/Nelly, a genderqueer teen being interrogated by a mysterious man after a series of events that occurred at a shopping mall. The play is written by the talented Dave Deveau (pictured) who h-core fans will remember from his days on the sweet 90s spooky anthology series Are You Afraid of the Dark? Nelly Boy's production is very solid. Christine Horne's direction is topnotch, and combined with excellent......

Once a year Toronto the Good becomes Toronto the very naughty. FFN (formerly known as Folsom Fair North) is Toronto's annual fetish fair. Now in its fifth year, the Fair features everything from play areas and parties to an art tent. Festivities kick off July 20 with the Welcome to Toronto party, being held at Alibi. The next night is Agitator, FFN’s big deal sports-themed fetish blowout at the Opera House. The FFN web......

Perhaps that headline is a bit over-the-top. Then again, so was this entire show! Maybe it was just this Torontoist's own expectations that a show selling itself as a gay hip hop opera couldn't really take itself too seriously; would be ironic; would be tongue-in-cheek. Not so. BASH'd is a gay hip hop opera that wants you to know that it is a gay hip hop opera and there's nothing wrong with that! There's......

Dad Who? is the latest in Susan Fischer's popular series of Evelyn Reese shows. If you've seen one of her other shows, you're familiar with the shtick: Evelyn is a clueless, aging harridan in sequin jumpsuits and crazy-person glasses whose one-woman shows consist of her often politically incorrect musings on her own life. Topics range from dating, to drinking to partying with her favourite "poofter" friend. Fischer's physicality is phenomenal. She entirely inhabits the......