THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Chloe Sevigny is getting down on her knees again, only this time it's to pray. After displaying the kind of steel nerves most other actors would kill to possess by co-starring in the most notorious sexual moment of this year's most notorious art film, The Brown Bunny, the Oscar nominee is taking a 180-degree turn and playing a nun in Three Needles. A new drama from gay director Thom Fitzgerald (Beefcake, The Hanging Garden), Needles follows three groups of people struggling with HIV in three different countries and also stars Olympia Dukakis, Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman, and Sandra Oh. Needles marks Fitzgerald's second journey into AIDS-themed filmmaking after 2003's The Event; it's also the daring Sevigny's first role as a woman of the cloth. The Catholic Church could not be reached for comment.

Kevin Smith's Passion for Clerks

What does a filmmaker with a reputation for raunch do when his first family comedy tanks? He goes back to where his bread's buttered, of course. After the box-office failure of Jersey Girl, director Kevin Smith has announced a sequel to his hit 1994 debut, Clerks. Currently titled The Passion of the Clerks, the story will reunite cast members Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson as the lazy Quik Stop and RST Video employees who do nothing but hang around, outswear each other, and verbally spar with the nominally heterosexual, but mostly closet-dwelling 'life partners' Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith). Get ready for an onslaught of Smith's trademark gay-friendly gay jokes, and look for opening-weekend theater seats to be filled with his rabid cult following, who'll devour this movie like a box of Twinkies.

The Right-Wing Stuff

He was the gay Dutch politician disliked by many lesbians and gay men in the Netherlands. He was a right-wing populist with racial opinions that liberals hated. But Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyantly gay public figure, was popular with exactly the constituency most gay politicos can't reach: powerful corporate executives and blue-collar voters. Then he was assassinated by an animal-rights activist. Now, it doesn't get much more cinematic than that, which is why Fortuyn's life will soon see big-screen treatment in May 6th, a biopic to be directed by Theo van Gogh, the great-great-grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh. That Fortuyn's life was fascinating is not the question. The mystery is whether queer audiences will see themselves in the controversial Dutchman or simply avoid his fictionalized life story altogether. Find out when the subtitles unspool sometime in 2005.

Luck Be a Lady

Making straight men uncomfortable is always good for a laugh. Now, if only network TV could make it happen. The evidence to suggest they can't? Fox's dating show, Playing It Straight, was cancelled, its 'winners' forever a mystery; Seriously Dude ... I'm Gay, was filmed but never aired; and a previously announced reality series, Awful Pretty—in which straight men have to compete in drag—has yet to materialize. Trying to make the formula work again is TBS's He's a Lady, which promises to trick stereotypically macho guys into wearing pumps and panties for a prize of $250,000, is set to air in October. The guys-as-dolls will have to live in a frilly house, serve as bridesmaids in a real wedding, and—best of all—have their efforts judged by Morgan Fairchild. Ah, progress!

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