Hollywood or Sodom: A conversation about Charles Busch’s rich career

Entretien avec Charles Busch, acteur/écrivain/chanteur, connu pour ses comédies, son jeu drag et son penchant pour le glamour hollywoodien. L’entretien a eu lieu le 2 février 2023 à New York, au domicile de l’auteur.Interview with Charles Busch, actor/playwright/singer, well-known for his comedies, his drag acting and his penchant for 1940s Hollywood glamour. The interview took place on February 2nd 2023, at the author’s New York home

Sexual Distancing: Remembrance of Sex Past in Robert Chesley’s Jerker

Inspiré du parallèle, souvent dressé de nos jours, entre la pandémie de Covid-19 et le sida, cet essai propose une lecture de Jerker or the Helping Hand de Robert Chesley, pour explorer la « distanciation sexuelle » parmi les hommes homosexuels, tels que dépeints dans les pièces américaines du milieu des années 1980. Le paramètre qu’introduit le théâtre, au-delà de la distanciation sexuelle physique, est le déplacement du sexuel dans le passé. En effet, dans Jerker, les deux personnages recourent systématiquement à la mémoire pour alimenter leurs fantasmes masturbatoires mais aussi pour retracer, dans un processus de régression, le désir homosexuel jusqu’à sa forme la plus primitive. Dans la mesure où le sexe y est une activité qui se reporte exclusivement au passé, Jerker (1986) propose un nouveau paradigme que les pièces sur le sida suivront pendant plusieurs années.Inspired by recent analogies drawn between the Covid-19 pandemic and the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, this essay addresses the ways in which AIDS plays attest to a “sexual distancing”, in particular with reference to Robert Chesley’s Jerker or the Helping Hand. Even though other plays also explore exclusion and stigmatisation, Jerker tackles not only physical sexual distancing but also the displacement of the sexual into the past. Indeed, both characters in Jerker resort systematically to their memory not only to feed their masturbatory fantasies but also to recount, through a process of regression, their homosexual desire down to its most primitive form. Inasmuch as sex acts in it refer exclusively to the past, Jerker (1986) advances a new paradigm that AIDS plays would follow for several years

Microstructure-driven annihilation effects and dispersive excited state dynamics in solid-state films of a model sensitizer for photon energy up-conversion applications

Bimolecular processes involving exciton spin-state interactions gain attention for their deployment as wavelength-shifting tools. Particularly triplet–triplet annihilation induced photon energy up-conversion (TTA-UC) holds promise to enhance the performance of solar cell and photodetection technologies. Despite the progress noted, a correlation between the solid-state microstructure of photoactuating TTA-UC organic composites and their photophysical properties is missing. This lack of knowledge impedes the effective integration of functional TTA-UC interlayers as ancillary components in operating devices. We here investigate a solution-processed model green-to-blue TTA-UC binary composite. Solid-state films of a 9,10 diphenyl anthracene (DPA) blue-emitting activator blended with a (2,3,7,8,12,13,17,18-octaethyl-porphyrinato) PtII (PtOEP) green-absorbing sensitizer are prepared with a range of compositions and examined by a set of complementary characterization techniques. Grazing incidence X-ray diffractometry (GIXRD) measurements identify three PtOEP composition regions wherein the DPA:PtOEP composite microstructure varies due to changes in the packing motifs of the DPA and PtOEP phases. In Region 1 (≤2 wt%) DPA is semicrystalline and PtOEP is amorphous, in Region 2 (between 2 and 10 wt%) both DPA and PtOEP phases are amorphous, and in Region 3 (≥10 wt%) DPA remains amorphous and PtOEP is semicrystalline. GIXRD further reveals the metastable DPA-β polymorph species as the dominant DPA phase in Region 1. Composition dependent UV-vis and FT-IR measurements identify physical PtOEP dimers, irrespective of the structural order in the PtOEP phase. Time-gated photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy imaging confirm the presence of PtOEP aggregates, even after dispersing DPA:PtOEP in amorphous poly(styrene). When arrested in Regions 1 and 2, DPA:PtOEP exhibits delayed PtOEP fluorescence at 580 nm that follows a power-law decay on the ns time scale. The origin of PtOEP delayed fluorescence is unraveled by temperature- and fluence-dependent PL experiments. Triplet PtOEP excitations undergo dispersive diffusion and enable TTA reactions that activate the first singlet-excited (S1) PtOEP state. The effect is reproduced when PtOEP is mixed with a poly(fluorene-2-octyl) (PFO) derivative. Transient absorption measurements on PFO:PtOEP films find that selective PtOEP photoexcitation activates the S1 of PFO within ∼100 fs through an up-converted 3(d, d*) PtII-centered state