“The Warriors” was filmed in 1979 and is about feuding gangs; I went to see it expecting that it would be fun but utterly misogynistic, possibly with a side of gay-bashing. Instead, it pulled off a difficult feat: it showed misogynistic characters, but demonstrated that they were in the wrong, and did so without feeling the least bit preachy.

I didn’t realize this at first. When the movie opens, one character cheerfully talks about finding a woman to for “a lay”; when another demurs, he’s accused of being a faggot. And in the first crowd scene, not a single woman is visible - although the gangs in the movie follow no color barriers; the leader of the Warriors, Cleon, is a black man and his second-in-command, Swan, white; almost every gang we see is of mixed ethnicity, and nobody ever comments on this or finds it odd. It fit the setting that the gangs were all-male, but the racial mixing made me raise my eyebrows. It could have been the director’s trying to be progressive, or it could have been lazy extra casting.

(Hello, everyone; I’m Rook, a new writer here, planning to focus on queer isues in film and literature.)

I recently had the good fortune to be able to see the Oregon Shakespere Festival’s production of The Tempest, directed by Libby Appel. …