New Deal - Useless Wooden Toys (1990)

A dynamic journey of self-acceptance and identity.

Liar, Liar, Vampire takes a bite out of clichés in romances between vampires and teenagers. Anything but boring and dripping with fun, it's a Halloween story with a twist.

Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus is a beautiful, poignant, enraging, gut-wrenching, and heartbreaking film about the trauma and harm conversion therapy inflicts on young queer people. Even though its classification as horror holds, the emotional bond between the two main characters, Naim and Ryan, elevates the story into a realistic romantic drama on par with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

An aspect of She-Ra that I find refreshing is even though a large portion of the cast is on the LGBTQ+ Spectrum, being gay is never mentioned. While this might initially sound like a negative thing, in the show’s land of Etheria being on the gay spectrum is shown to be so common and normalized that straight isn’t the default. As much as there is to appreciate about narratives revolving around the obstacles that may come from being non-heteronormative, it’s nice to get immersed in a world where no one bats an eye at all to any sort of differing identity.

Episode 3, entitled “Now in Color,” brings us to the 1970s — a decade full of vibrancy, color, and total mayhem.

It was always people for Joe, and he ultimately found them at the end of a long, painful, yet illuminating quest for self-discovery outside of one, confident constant - his bisexuality.