Roy Cohn/Jack Smith

From one of the seminal theatrical events of the 90s—Ron Vawter's stunning performance piece Roy Cohn/Jack Smith—Jill Godmilow has crafted a dramatically deft, comic and terrifying film diptych of queer-on-queer.

Roy Cohn, the homophobic right-wing lawyer and sleazy backroom politico, thunders against the Sodom and Gomorrah of homosexuality at a banquet for the American Society for the Protection of the Family - while across town and light years away, the notorious underground filmmaker of Flaming Creatures fame Jack Smith, in flamboyant harem drag, constructs his own private resistance theatre from fragments of Arabian Nights kitsch, avant-garde film feuds and passionate B movie camp.

Cohn and Smith had nothing in common except their homosexuality and their death from AIDS in the late 1980s. Vawter, who accepts and produces both men in his own voice and body, also died of AIDS, six months after the film was shot.

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, dir. Jill Godmilow, USA 1995, 88 min, 16mm