It’s hard to think of another point in time when LGBTIQQ youth have been so visible across media, for better and for worse. Thousands of young male and female fans watch Kurt Hummel, the openly gay teen on Glee played by Chris Colfer, even as elsewhere on the hit show’s network, conservative pundits try to downplay the problem of anti-queer bullying and rail against the evils of same-sex marriage. And of course, there is the It Gets Better Project, an unprecedented outpouring of direct address aimed at queer youth that has outgrown YouTube and to some degree–with each successive PSA from a politician, sports team, celebrity and corporation—its original target audience.

So, when I wrote last year that Frameline34, “truly belongs to the young,” my estimation might have been premature. It is especially fitting then that at this year’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival three of the showcase features—Spork, Mangus! and Tomboy, along with opening night selection Gun Hill Road all centered around the lives of young folk. Each of these films eschews the more egregious clichés that have glommed on to that perennial favorite of LGBT film festivals, the coming of age narrative, by shifting the drama from coming out to the more complicated art of getting by.

Once upon a time (1987 to be exact), two young men who were old friends moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to take in all the big city had to offer. Like many 20-somethings, Eddie Lee “Sausage” and Mitchell “Mitch D” Deprey didn’t have a lot of money and wound up living in a somewhat derelict apartment in the Lower Haight with a bright pink exterior they dubbed “the Pepto Bismol Palace.” The paint was peeling and the walls were thin but the rent was cheap.

What Eddie and Mitch didn’t count on was having Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman as their neighbors. “You blind cocksucker. You wanna fuck with me? You try to touch me, and I will kill you in a fucking minute.” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, little man!”

Hell hath no fury like an enraged Klaus Kinski. The late German actor, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as the combusting supernova at the center of the Wernzer Herzog films Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Cobra Verde (1987), was as famous for his coruscating off-camera temper as for his onscreen intensity. With Kinski, there is always the near-unanswerable question of to what extent is his performance acting and to what extent is he just being himself. Are we watching someone who has totally, obsessively (unhealthily?) committed to his craft, or a petulant diva whose overinflated ego perhaps bruises too easily?

Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savoir, a recently rediscovered concert film of a 1971 solo performance, makes a riveting case for all of the above. Filmed a year before he headed to the South American jungle with Herzog, Jesus Christ finds Kinski alone on a spot-lit stage before a packed house delivering a monologue that frames Christ as a persecuted outlaw. “Wanted: Jesus Christ,” he purrs, “charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state.”

[This was my first cover story for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. As always with these sort of longer pieces I had to leave out more voices than I would have liked to. -M]

The booths have been dismantled, countless plastic cups and empty liquor bottles are heading to recycling centers, and the exhibitors have returned to the quiet of their respective white cubes. San Francisco’s big, busy art fair weekend has come and gone. By many accounts it was a success for a city that two years ago hadn’t had an art fair in almost two decades, even if, in retrospect, it doesn’t feel like the lay of the land has been significantly altered.

The buzz generated by the raucous preview parties for SF’s two newest fairs, artMRKT and ArtPadSF, carried on throughout the weekend, no doubt helped by the good weather and ever-present availability of booze. When I arrived at the Phoenix early Saturday afternoon, the young, stylish crowd (which included a few families) milled around the hotel’s patio, awaiting a much-hyped synchronized swimming performance organized by Bean Gilsdorf, a California College of the Arts student. Other visitors popped in and out of the midcentury modern hotel’s rooms, each occupied by a gallery, like excited college students on their first day at the dorms. “It’s been positive so far,” said Patricia Sweetow, one of the first gallerists to sign on with ArtPadSF.”The fairs give the community a focus, a place, a reason to celebrate.”

Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later.

Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton.

In his scathing review of Robert Siodmak’s 1944 film Phantom Lady, critic Bosley Crowther rattles off what is essentially a laundry list of stylistic hallmarks of the not-yet named genre that Siodmak would later be recognized as a master of: film noir. “[Phantom Lady] is full of the play of light and shadow, of macabre atmosphere, of sharply realistic faces and dramatic injections of sound,” Crowther writes. “People sit around in gloomy places looking blankly and silently into space, music blares forth from empty darkness, and odd characters turn up and disappear.” He ends his dressing-down by taking Siodmak and producer Joan Harrison (a former screenwriter for Hitchcock) to task for overlooking “one basic thing” in their efforts to get the film’s look right: “a plausible, realistic plot.”

History has proven Crowther wrong; or rather, it has proven that he got everything but the part about plot right. Fans haven’t kept returning to film noir’s “macabre atmosphere[s],” its “sharply realistic faces” in “gloomy places looking blankly and silently into space,” and its “play of light and shadow” to simply find out whodunit each time. In noir, style can be substantive with the storyline often but a means to those ends. Just look at Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), whose wildly careening plot and stylistic excessiveness puts it about as far from plausible and realistic as you can get, and yet it has been hailed as the sine qua non of the genre for those very reasons.