What’s your essential piece of queer pop culture?

An avant-garde death dream, transposing filmmaker Derek Jarman’s fading eyesight to an unceasing, unyielding blue frame for 79 solid minutes, Blue is one of the most poetic and sensational films ever made. Jarman’s diary-close text, read in voiceover by Jarman and longtime collaborators John Quentin, Nigel Terry, and Tilda Swinton, moves between memory and imagery easily, leaping from playful profanity to heartbreakingly simple repetition as one would cross a stream on a series of flat stones. Of course, you don’t buy new shoes when you’re dying of AIDS. The shoes you’ve got on will do until you don’t need them any longer.Sad, furious, and masterful, it’s as intimate a farewell as has ever been put on screen. A blind gay man, attacking and mourning and laughing at his fate, sums up so much of the AIDS crisis and the response of those affected. It’s hard now for me to even see a blank-screened TV, looking for input, without the memories of this movie welling up in my mind. Jarman’s blue sharpens us, consumes us, cuts out all the other bullshit of the world, and allows us to really, truly listen to the end of his life. You know how they say that removing one sense heightens your others? Blue is a sensory deprivation film, but it gives you so much in return. [Jacob Oller]