If we were forced to declare why “Grey Gardens” became a cult classic among gay men, it would be all the juicy quotes that have become part of the queer lexicon.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of its theatrical release this month, the landmark documentary profiles two eccentrics: Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale (known as “Big” and “Little” Edie, respectively), the aunt and cousin of former first lady Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and socialite Lee Radziwell. Once moving within an elite circle of American aristocrats, they had fallen into poverty and were living in isolation at their run-down estate (the Grey Gardens of the title) in East Hampton, Long Island; they re-entered the public eye in 1972 after local authorities threatened eviction and demolition of their mansion over health code violations, prompting their famous relatives to swoop in and pay for the necessary repairs to avoid further family scandal. 

At the time, Radziwell had enlisted filmmaking brothers David and Albert Maysles to take footage for a later-abandoned project of her own, bringing them along when she went to put in an appearance at the Grey Gardens clean-up efforts. It was their first encounter with the Beales; the second came two years later, when they returned with their cameras (but without Radziwell) and proceeded to make documentary history, turning the two Edies into unlikely cultural icons in the process.

On paper, it reads like something painful: two embittered former socialites, a mother and daughter living among a legion of cats and raccoons in the literal ruins of their former life, where they dwell on old memories, rehash old conflicts, and take out their resentments on each other, attempting to keep up appearances while surviving on a diet that may or may not include cat food. Truthfully, it is sometimes difficult to watch, which is why it’s easier to approach from surface level, focusing on the “wacky” eccentricities and seeing the Beales as objects for ridicule. 

Yet to do so is to miss the true brilliance of a movie that is irresistible, unforgettable, and fascinating to the point of being hypnotic, and that’s because of the Beales themselves, who are far too richly human to be dismissed on the basis of conventional judgments.

First is Little Edie, in her endless array of headscarves (to cover her hair loss from alopecia) and her ever-changing wardrobe of DIY “revolutionary costumes,” a one-time model and might-have-been showgirl who is obviously thrilled at having an audience and rises giddily to the occasion like a pro. Flamboyant, candid, and smarter than we think, she’s also fearlessly vulnerable; she gives us access to an emotional landscape shaped by the heartbreaks of a past that’s gradually revealed as the movie goes on, and it’s her ability to pull herself together and come back fighting that wins us over. By the time she launches into her monologue about being a “S-T-A-U-N-C-H” woman, we have no doubt that it’s true.

Then there’s Big Edie, who comes across as an odd mix of imperious dowager and down-to-earth grandma. She gets her own chance to shine for the camera, especially in the scenes where she reminisces about her early days as a “successful” amateur vocalist, singing along to records of songs she used to perform as glimpses emerge of the beauty and talent she commanded in her prime. She’s more than capable of taking on her daughter in their endless squabbles, and savvy enough to score serious points in the conflict, like stirring up jealousy with her attentions to beefy young handyman Jerry – whom the younger Edie has dubbed “the Marble Faun” – when he comes around to share a feast of boiled corn-on-the-cob with them. “Jerry likes the way I do my corn,” she deadpans to the camera, even though we know it’s meant for Little Edie.

It’s not just that their eccentricities verge on camp; that’s certainly an undeniable part of the appeal, but it falls away quickly as you begin to recognize that even if these women are putting on a show for the camera, they’re still being completely themselves – and they are spectacular.

Yes, their verbal sparring is often shrill and palpably toxic – in particular, Big Edie has no qualms about belittling and shaming her daughter in an obviously calculated effort to undermine her self-esteem and discourage her from making good on her repeated threats to leave Grey Gardens. We know she is acting from fear of abandonment, but it’s cruel, all the same. 

These are the moments that disturb us more than any of the dereliction we see in their physical existence; fed by nostalgia and forged in a deep codependence that neither wants to acknowledge, their dynamic reflects years of social isolation that has made them into living ghosts, going through the habitual motions of a long-lost life, ruminating on ancient resentments, and mulling endlessly over memories of the things that led them to their outcast state. As Little Edie says early on, “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. Do you know what I mean?”

That pithy observation, spoken conspiratorially to the Maysles’ camera, sets the tone for the entirety of “Grey Gardens,” perhaps even suggesting an appropriate point of meditation through which to contemplate everything that follows. It’s a prime example of the quotability that has helped this odd little movie endure as a fixture in queer culture; for many LGBTQ people, both Edies – born headstrong, ambitious, and independent into a social strata that only wanted its women to be well-behaved – became touchstones of frustrated longing, of living out one’s own fabulousness in isolated secrecy. Add to that shared inner experience Little Edie’s knack for turning scraps into kitschy fashion (and the goofy-but-joyous flag dance she performs as a sort of climactic topper near the end), and it should be obvious why the Maysles Brothers’ little project still resonates with the community five decades later.

Indeed, watching it in today’s cultural climate, it strikes chords that resonate through an even wider spectrum, touching on feminist themes through these two “problematic” women who have been effectively banished for refusing to fit into a mold, and on the larger issue of social and economic inequality that keeps them trapped, ultimately turning them against each other in their powerlessness.

With that in mind, it’s clear these women were never filmed to be objects of ridicule. They’re survivors in a world in which even their unimaginably wealthy relatives would rather look away, offering a bare minimum of help only when their plight becomes a matter of public family embarrassment, and the resilience they show in the face of tremendous adversity makes them worthy of celebration, instead.

That’s why “Grey Gardens” still hits close to home, why it entertains despite its darkness, and why we remember it as something bittersweet but beautiful. By the end of it, we recognize that the two Edies could be any of us, which means they are ALL of us – and if they can face their challenges with that much “revolutionary” spirit, then maybe we can be “staunch” against our adversities, too.

One of the highlights of last week’s Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend came not on the dance floor, but in a movie theater. In a new partnership, the independent film studio A24 brought its leather-clad new film “Pillion” to D.C. for special showings for the MAL crowd.

“Pillion,” a term for the motorcycle passenger seated behind the driver, delves into the complicated relationship between an introverted, quiet Londoner Colin (Harry Melling) who embarks on a journey finding himself while entering into a sub relationship with a new Dom named Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) he meets during Christmas. 

It’s writer-director Harry Lighton’s feature-length debut, sharing Skarsgård’s impossibly toned physique with both Colin and audiences, and offering an eye into the BDSM community by an LGBTQ director for the general public. This from a studio that also just released a movie about ping-pong starring Timothée Chalamet.  

The Washington Blade was able to catch a screening at Regal Gallery Place on Jan. 18, hosted by MAL and Gary Wasdin, executive director, Leather Archives & Museum. The Blade also had a chance to interview Lighton about the experience.

Blade: How did you get involved in this film, especially as this is your directorial debut?

Lighton: I was sent “Box Hill,” the novel on which “Pillion” is based, by Eva Yates (the head of film at the BBC). I’d spent years working on a sumo film set in Japan, and then suddenly that became impossible due to the pandemic so I was miserable. And then I read this book that I found bracing, funny, moving. All the good things. 

Blade: Are you involved with the leather community? Did you draw on any personal experiences or make connections with the community? 

Lighton: I’m involved in the wrestling scene but not the leather community. So I spent lots of time with people who are [in the community] during the writing process, and then ended up casting a bunch of them as bikers and pillions in the film. They were incredibly generous to myself, Harry, and Alex with their knowledge and experiences. We have them to thank for lending credibility to the world on screen.

Blade:  What kind of reception have you received at film festivals and with the LGBTQ community? Was it what you imagined?

Lighton: Obviously not everyone’s going to like the film — for some people it’ll be too explicit, for some not explicit enough; some people will feel seen, some won’t. But the general reaction’s been extremely positive so far. If I’m honest I thought it would divide opinion more.   

Blade: How was it working with the actors?

Lighton:  I had a lot of respect for both of them going in, and wondered if that might make me a bit too deferential, a bit too Colin-coded. But besides being extremely talented, they’re both lovely. And committed. And fun! With my shorts I always felt a bit out of my depth working with actors, but here I discovered a real love for it.  

Blade: Turning to the plot, the parents are pretty supportive, especially Colin’s dad. How did you decide to draw his parents? What does it mean to show parents with nuanced viewpoints?

Lighton:  I wanted to reverse the typical parent-child dynamic in queer film, where parents go from rejecting to accepting their queer kid. We meet Colin’s parents actively pushing him toward a gay relationship. But when the relationship he lands on doesn’t meet her definition of healthy, his mum withdraws her acceptance. I wanted to ask: Are they projecting their romantic model onto their son, or do they have a legitimate concern for his wellbeing with Ray?

Blade: How did you decide to place the setting?

Lighton: Practically, we needed somewhere within reach of London. But I liked the idea that Colin, who lives life on the periphery, grew up on the edge of the capital. One of our producers, Lee Groombridge, grew up in and around Bromley and showed me all the spots. I loved the atmosphere on the high street, the markets, and the contrast between the high street and the idyllic park. And I thought it would be a funny place for Alexander Skarsgård to have settled.

Blade: What do you hope audiences take away from the film? 

Lighton: There’s no one message. Different people will take different things from it. Personally, Colin inspires me to jump off cliffs, to push beyond my comfort zone because that’s where life begins. From Ray I get the courage to be ugly, to fly in the face of social convention if it doesn’t make you happy or it’s not built for you. 

Blade: Talk about the soundtrack — especially the Tiffany “I Think We’re Alone Now” song.

Lighton: Skarsgård’s Ray has the surface masc-ness that comes with looking like a Viking. I wanted to combine that with details that indicate he’s been a part of gay culture and “I Think We’re Alone Now” is nothing if not a camp classic.  

Blade: What does it mean to you to show the film at MAL?

Lighton: When I told the bikers from the film I was coming to MAL they practically wet themselves with excitement. We put a lot of thought and effort into how we depicted the community in the film and there’s so much variety, no two Masters or subs are the same, but seeing a theater full of men in leather laugh, cry, and clap for the film meant the world.

In 1976, a movie called “Network” electrified American moviegoers with a story in which a respected news anchor goes on the air and exhorts his viewers to go to their windows and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

It’s still an iconic line, and it briefly became a familiar catch phrase in the mid-’70s lexicon of pop culture, the perfect mantra for a country worn out and jaded by a decade of civil unrest, government corruption, and the increasingly powerful corporations that were gradually extending their influence into nearly all aspects of American life. Indeed, the movie itself is an expression of that same frustration, a satire in which a man’s on-the-air mental health crisis is exploited by his corporate employers for the sake of his skyrocketing ratings – and spawns a wave of “reality” programming that sensationalizes outrage, politics, and even violence to turn it into popular entertainment for the masses. Sound familiar?

It felt like an exaggeration at the time, an absurd scenario satirizing the “anything-for-ratings” mentality that had become a talking point in the public conversation. Decades later, it’s recognized as a savvy premonition of things to come.

This, of course, is not a review of “Network.” Rather, it’s a review of the latest movie by “new queer cinema” pioneer Gus Van Sant (his first since 2018), which is a fictionalized account of a real-life on-the-air incident that happened only a few months after “Network” prompted national debate about the media’s responsibility in choosing what it should and should not broadcast – and the fact that it strikes a resonant chord for us in 2026 makes it clear that debate is as relevant as ever.

“Dead Man’s Wire” follows the events of a 63-hour hostage situation in Indianapolis that begins when Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) shows up for an early morning appointment at the office of a mortgage company to which he is under crippling debt. Ushered into a private office for a one-on-one meeting with Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery), son of the brokerage’s wealthy owner, he kidnaps the surprised executive at gunpoint and rigs him with a “dead man’s wire” – a device that secures a shotgun against a captive’s head that is triggered to discharge with any attempt at escape – before calling the police himself to issue demands for the release of his hostage, which include immunity for his actions, forgiveness of his debt, reimbursement for money he claims was swindled from him by the company, and an apology. 

The crisis becomes a public spectacle when Kiritsis subjects his prisoner to a harrowing trip through the streets back to his apartment, which he claims is wired with explosives. As the hours tick by, the neighborhood surrounding his building becomes a media circus. Realizing that law enforcement officials are only pretending to negotiate while they make plans to take him down, he enlists the aid of popular local radio DJ Fred Heckman (Colman Domingo) to turn the situation into a platform for airing his grievances –  and for calling out the predatory financial practices that drove him to this desperate situation in the first place.

We won’t tell you how it plays out, for the sake of avoiding spoilers, even though it’s all a matter of public record. Suffice to say that the crisis reaches a volatile climax in a live broadcast that’s literally one wrong move away from putting an explosion of unpredictable real-life violence in front of millions of TV viewers.

In 1977, the Kiritsis incident certainly contributed to ongoing concerns about violence on television, but there was another aspect of the case that grabbed public attention: Kiritsis himself. Described by those who knew him as “helpful,” “kind,” and a “hard worker,” he was hardly the image of a hardened criminal, and many Americans – who shared his anger and desperation over the opportunistic greed of a finance industry they believed was playing them for profit – could sympathize with his motives. Inevitably, he became something of a populist hero – or anti-hero, at least – for standing up to a stacked system, an underdog who spoke things many of them felt and took actions many of them wished they could take, too.

That’s the thing that makes this true-life crime adventure uniquely suited to the talents of Van Sant, a veteran indie auteur whose films have always specialized in humanizing “outsider” characters, usually pushed to the fringes of society by circumstances only partly under their own control, and often driven to desperate acts in pursuit of an unattainable dream. Tony Kiritsis, a not-so-regular “Joe” whose fumbling efforts toward financial security have been turned against him and who seeks only recompense for his losses, fits that profile to a tee, and the filmmaker gives us a version of him (aided by Skarsgård’s masterfully modulated performance) which leaves little doubt that he – from a certain point of view, at least – is the story’s unequivocal protagonist, no matter how “lawless” his actions might be.

It helps that the film gives us much more exposure to Kiritsis’ personality than could be drawn merely from the historic live broadcast that made him infamous, spending much of the movie focused on his interactions with Hall (performed with equally well-managed nuance by Montgomery) during the two days spent in the apartment, as well as his dealings with DJ Heckman (rendered with street savvy and close-to-the-chest cageyness by Domingo); for balance, we also get fly-on-the-wall access to the interplay outside between law enforcement officials (including Cary Elwes’ blue collar neighborhood cop) as they try to navigate a potentially deadly situation, and to the jockeying of an ambitious rookie street reporter (Myha’la) with the rest of the press for “scoops” with each new development.

But perhaps the interaction that finally sways us in Kiritsis’s favor takes place via phone with his captive’s mortgage tycoon father (Al Pacino, evoking every unscrupulous, amoral mob boss he’s ever played), who is willing to sacrifice his own son’s life rather than negotiate a deal. It’s a nugget of revealed avarice that was absent in the “official” coverage of the ordeal, which largely framed Kiritsis as mentally unstable and therefore implied a lack of credibility to his accusations against Meridian Mortgage. It’s also a moment that hits hard in an era when the selfishness of wealthy men feels like a particularly sore spot for so many struggling underdogs.

That’s not to say there’s an overriding political agenda to “Dead Man’s Wire,” though Van Sant’s character-driven emphasis helps make it into something more than just another tension-fueled crime story; it also works to raise the stakes by populating the story with real people instead of predictable tropes, which, coupled with cinematographer Arnaud Potier’s studied emulation of gritty ‘70s cinema and the director’s knack for inventive visual storytelling, results in a solid, intelligent, and darkly humorous thriller – and if it reconnects us to the “mad-as-hell” outrage of the “Network” era, so much the better.

After all, if the last 50 years have taught us anything about the battle between ethics and profit, it’s that profit usually wins.