It's excellent. It's a great essay (done in a particular and creative way) on gay life by a gay man who lived in Berlin in 1970, and it sounds valid even today to think about the progress we have made. 50 years later, we can say, many good things have happened for homosexual people in many countries of the world and societies have changed too. As the movie asks for, many of us have come together and fought for our rights (and still are) ... Equality marriage is a reality (even parenthood by adoption or surrogacy, etc.) not even imagined in this movie . We also navigate the water of AIDS... We learned how to maintain a relationship for years or decades (through agreements that are often not so "classic")... and even we helped heterosexuals to expand their options in terms of ways of being as a couple or building a family (for example through civil unions, or open relationships, etc...) And most importantly, we learned how to overcome the internal homophobia, the self-hatred that many of us had developed as children, simply because our family and the people around us were homophobic ... I think this is the main subject of this film ... The fight against homophobia starting with ourselves and of course the others (the macho culture, the submission of women , the religions built around that, etc.). And we did ... (and we still are) ..

50 years on indeed.....and yes some things have changed immensely and back then one couldn't even fathom the curse and blessing that the AIDS epidemic would be for the gay and LGBTQI scene.

Yet things haven't all changed, some stuff stubbornly and depressingly stayed the same. And even though society is perverse, a lot of the inward critical reflection of this movie still rings true.

On the very big plus side, the film looks gorgeous, the styling somewhere between 70's realism and a full fledged John Waters phantasmagoria - the non-acting actors perfectly cast. Can they act ? Well maybe not in the traditional sense, but like any Waters/Warhol movie the actors themselves rise above the acting by virtue of being true. And isn't that what a million hours of Lee Strasberg actors Studio or Shakespearean training are supposed to give you ?

Tha actors playing the part are 200% believable if maybe their acting is a strange style unto itself (not uncommon in queer cinema).

The costuming, sets, staging is phenomenal. The sort of thing modern gay artists strive for at immense costs here done on ....less than a shoestring ?

I love both the " cliche'd" exagerration, the sterotypes, the comedy, the melodrama and the total earnestness. Which makes this film very unique.

The earnestness - especially in the long drawn out final scene - is A- totally earned and B -at once cutting deep and very sweet.

Mr. Rosa, hats off to you, i bow deep.

"It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives" (I will not mention the German title because it is so long and will give a dozen spelling mistakes) is a West German German-language movie from 1971, so this one has its 45th anniversary this year. It is an early career effort by Rosa von Praunheim, who was not even 30 at that point and he is still known today for being one of the most influential homosexual filmmakers, even if pretty much all of his works went under the radar during his long career. And the title here already tells you the subject of this mix of fiction and documentary movie. There are so so many gay-themed (short )films coming out these days 8and in the last 15-20 years) that still act as if homosexuality was a huge problem, but this is incorrect as the majority of people have grown really tolerant by now. But back in the early 1970s, it was completely different. Homosexuality was a complete taboo, so RvP (actually a Latvian-born filmmaker) had an outstanding opportunity to really make a difference on an important subject and show audiences the path of understanding and tolerance for the future. He did no such thing. The only intention I see here is probably to shock as many people as possible. There is not a single stereotype about gays that is not included here. This refers to leather police outfits, to cross-dressing, to causal sex at public toilets (ewwwwwww..) and more. The narration is not good, but the acting, especially the voice acting are way worse admittedly and make this almost an unbearable watch because the actors are (almost )all so so bad. Yeah well, I see von Praunheim here trying to be as controversial as possible and this is probably a reason (besides the title )why this film here is still relatively well-known today, especially in the LBGT community. The best thing about it, for me, is certainly how short it was, only slightly longer than an hour. I don't recommend the watch. Not at all.