�y��vlog

His first release as a solo artist, it sees the star embrace the sounds of 80s club culture, with influences ranging from the queer-coded pop of Erasure and Pet Shop Boys to the thunderous drum sounds of Janet Jackson and Art Of Noise.

And I didn’t know their winking humor was rooted in Hollywood’s pansy craze of the 1920s and ’30s, when actors like Franklin Pangborn played prissy hotel managers and other queer-coded characters at a time when being publicly gay carried the risk of arrest.

While mutant experiences can speak to many different marginalized identities directly or metaphorically, the more queer-coded elements — questions around “coming out,” the fear of being rejected by family, strangers insisting mutants just needed to be “cured” — were often what I related to most then.

From the returning writer-director Yugo Sakamoto, “Baby Assassins 2” is an expansive, world building sequel that’s as much about the friendships shared by these teams of hired guns — especially Chisato and Mahiro’s queer-coded connection — as much as the body count they amass.

“They feel like really big, gay, expensive comic-book movies. Queer-coded villains are pretty much my favorite trope, and Joker has always been a really queer character to me.”