Muscular bodies dripping with sweat are all over cinema screens – and each other. But these films are very different from the sports romances of old This spring is shaping up to be the season of the artful athletic romance in cinema. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers both offer up their own twisted queer romances set within the world of sport. Both film-makers share a preoccupation with their athletes, lingering over their bodies in ultra-closeup. Muscles ripple and swell like the powerful pulse of the tide. Perfect, glistening orbs of sweat form then drift off ..read more

From James Baldwin to Sarah Waters, writers have been telling rich, nuanced LGBTQ+ tales for decades – here are some good titles to try Cinema listings seem to be stacked with films about queer relationships at the moment. From the eerie yet tender romance in All of Us Strangers to the electric sapphic fling in the forthcoming Love Lies Bleeding, these new offerings feel refreshingly nuanced, placing LGBTQ+ characters centre stage without pandering to reductive narratives or heteronormative taste. If you want to find such stories in your reading, too, why not try some of the following books? W ..read more

Fighting With Pride charity will lead work for memorial at National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire The UK’s first memorial commemorating the “lost legion” of LGBT people who have served in the armed forces is to be built at the National Memorial Arboretum. The memorial will be built after a charity spearheading efforts to get justice for veterans affected by the pre-2000 ban on LGBT people serving in the UK armed forces was awarded a £350,000 grant ..read more

Rights chief also warns Britain will be ‘judged harshly by history for its failure to help prevent civilian slaughter in Gaza’ The UK has been accused by Amnesty International of “deliberately destabilising” human rights on the global stage for its own political ends. In its annual global report, released today, the organisation said Britain was weakening human rights protections nationally and globally, amid a near-breakdown of international law ..read more

Tsai Ing-wen congratulates and praises drag star, who drew massive support in her home country, for ‘living fearlessly’ A drag queen has sparked national celebration as the “pride of Taiwan” and won praise and congratulations from the island’s president after winning RuPaul’s Drag Race at the weekend. On Saturday, the long-running, Emmy award-winning US reality show, in which drag queens compete in challenges including lip-sync performances, revealed the winner of its 16th season as Nymphia Wind, the drag personality creation of Leo Tsao, a 28-year-old Taiwanese designer ..read more

High court action will claim US owner allowed access to app users’ private information in breach of UK law Grindr faces the prospect of legal action by hundreds of users who will allege that the dating app shared highly sensitive personal information, including in some cases their HIV status, with advertising companies. The law firm Austen Hays is to file a claim on Monday in London’s high court alleging that the US owner of the app breached British data protection laws ..read more

Stone Nest, London Dante or Die’s intriguing but underdeveloped story is based on the case of two men, each convicted of a homophobic murder, who became the first same-sex couple to marry in a UK prison Basing a play on real events offers a safety blanket of authenticity, but the facts of a story being true is not always enough to make us believe in them. Dante or Die’s new production about a homophobic gay man in prison is packed with energy and built on significant research, but the storytelling skates over the surface of the knotty topics it tackles, and struggles to make its complex charac ..read more

He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius ‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was wi ..read more

When Victoria Villegas learned how her cousin had fled the Dominican Republic, and was gay like her, she was moved to chart his life There have been experimental, freestyling essay films and memoiristic documentaries around for years, going back to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil or Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I. But just lately it feels like the sprawling poetic-realist subgenre is flourishing, especially in the sunny uplands of film festivals. Like an extension of the creative-writing exhortation to “write about what you know” young documentary-makers are increasingly shooting movies about not ..read more

In 1999, the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho was attacked in a campaign of violence by a self-confessed racist and homophobe. It completely changed the course of my life On Saturday 17 April 1999, a bomb exploded in Brixton market in south London, injuring 48 people, including a 23-month-old child. Newspapers showed an X-ray of the toddler’s head with a nail embedded in the skull. Immediately, people knew that someone wanted to kill in an area that had a large Black community. This was the first of three nailbombs that were planted in the capital targeting minorities. The following weekend, a secon ..read more