Larry Kramer: 'I think anger is a wonderful useful emotion'

LARRY KRAMER: 'I THINK ANGER IS A WONDERFULLY USEFUL EMOTION' Remembering the AIDS activist who wrote The Normal Heart and the screenplay for Women in Love

Remembering the AIDS activist who wrote The Normal Heart and the screenplay for Women in Love

Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him. “I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t bring the question of art into it at all like most writers do. I’m a messenger.

Moffie review - heart rates will rise with Oliver Hermanus’ powerful war film

★★★★ MOFFIE Heart rates will rise with Oliver Hermanus’ powerful war film

A visceral LGBTQ period piece set against the backdrop of the South African Border War

Oliver Hermanus’ potent fourth feature Moffie certainly has a controversial film title. A homophobic slur, it can be translated from Afrikaans as "faggot". If you were to see buses with film posters emblazoned with the title in translation, there might rightly be cries of outrage.

Garth Greenwell: Cleanness review - pornography and high art

★★★★ GARTH GREENWELL: CLEANNESS Pain, fear & love: an American in Bulgaria

Pain, fear and love: an American teacher in Bulgaria

Both Cleanness and Garth Greenwell’s award-winning first novel, What Belongs to You, are set in Bulgaria, with a gay American teacher as the anonymous first-person narrator (Greenwell taught at the American College in Sofia from 2009 to 2015). In many respects, Cleanness is less clearly structured; it’s more like a collection of partly non-chronological short stories with recurring motifs.

Feel Good, Channel 4 and Netflix review - a fresh, bingeable comedy that digs deep but feels mild

★★★ FEEL GOOD A fresh, bingeable comedy that digs deep but feels mild

Mae Martin’s dramedy about addiction is honest and enjoyable — but is it that funny?

“I am not intense.” That declaration arrives early in Feel Good, the new Channel 4 and Netflix romantic comedy fronted by comedian Mae Martin, who plays a fictionalised version of herself. Over Mae’s shoulder, we see a literal trash fire. She’s lit up the evidence of a past drug addiction. It smoulders in the background while she smoulders in the front.

Kate Tempest, BBC 6 Music Festival review - more personal than political

A resonant evening of eloquent and grimy spoken word

For those wondering if performance poet Kate Tempest would be upstaged or introduced by either pandemic panic or International Women’s Day – know that a) she’s fearless and b) she practices equality always. As such, there’s no pre-amble, other than a hope that her gig will “resonate into the night and the days to come”.

RuPaul's Drag Race, Season 12, Netflix review - 13 queens up the game

★★★★ RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE, SEASON 12, NETFLIX 13 queens up the game

Shantay, they all stay, for now, but who'll win the crown is anyone's guess

As RuPaul's best squirrel friend Michelle Visage, co-doyenne of the amused and amusing judges, put it, "that was some next-level shit". She was referring to a high point in the contest's weekly lip sync-ing finales, right at the end of the new season's first entertainment (on Netflix), but it's true of the majority of the 13 queens presented over two episodes to compete for the crown.

Album: Maria McKee - La Vita Nuova

★★★★ MARIA MCKEE - LA VITA NUOVA Corruped punk radically reborn

The corrupted country-punk behind 'Show Me Heaven' is radically reborn

From Tom Cruise soundtrack hit singer to self-described “pansexual, polyamorous, gender-fluid dyke”, and from LA country-punks Lone Justice to a Blakean songwriter in thrall to London’s phantom spirits, Maria McKee’s 13-year musical absence has ended in personally spectacular fashion.

La Cage aux Folles [The Play], Park Theatre review - half-cock farce

Embarrassing period piece needs a lift from better comic timing than this

Not the musical then, worst luck. How timely it would have been to mark Jerry Herman's passing with a celebration of a great achievement. Just how brilliantly the pathos and panache of his score lift Jean Poiret's long-running 1970s farce about a gay couple and their St Tropez drag club having to "straighten up" for family values is only emphasised by this ultimately threadbare adaptation by Simon Callow.