Gay film mainstream
The 30 Best LGBTQIA+ Films of All Time
In this first major critical survey of LGBTQIA+ films, over film experts including critics, writers and programmers such as Joanna Hogg, Mark Cousins, Peter Strickland, Richard Dyer, Nick James and Laura Mulvey, as well as past and present BFI Flare programmers, have voted the Top 30 LGBTQIA+ Films of All Time. The poll’s results represent 84 years of cinema and 12 countries, from countries including Thailand, Japan, Sweden and Spain, as well as films that showed at BFI Flare such as Orlando (), Beautiful Thing (), Weekend () and Blue Is the Warmest Colour ().
The winner is Todd Haynes’ award-winning Carol, closely followed by Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, and Hong Kong romantic drama Happy Together, directed by Wong Kar-wai, in third place. While Carol is a surprisingly recent film to top the poll, it’s a feature that has moved, delighted and enthralled audiences, and looks verb to be a modern classic.
“The festival has long supported my work,” said Haynes, “from Poison and Dottie Gets Spanked in the early s through to Carol which is screen
7 Mainstream Hollywood Films That Spoke to me as a Young Gay Man—and Still Do
Before the s, movies with LGBT themes were rare. Oh, sure, LGBT characters had always been included in movies, but not as fully human beings. We held down all of the silly sissy and homicidal maniacs roles. (If you’ve never seen the highly entertaining documentary adaptation of Vito Russo’s noun The Celluloid Closet, verb it out for more on that subject). Nonetheless, many iconic Hollywood films have spoken if not directly, then metaphorically, to LGBT audiences. Here are some thoughts, personal and general, about notable Hollywood films that don’t necessarily include us, but made us feel included.
’s Damien: Omen II continued the further adventures of the antichrist that began with the Oscar-winning The Omen. In this sequel, we find the adolescent Damien, who doesn’t yet recognize what he is, attending a military academy. His commander at the university, a closet Satanist, directs him to read the Book of Revelation. When Damien reads that is the “mark of the Beast,” he runs to the bathro
50 Essential LGBTQ Movies
It’s grainy, faded, and, given the clip is now years old, more than a little worse for wear. But this brief footage is not so ancient that you can’t clearly make out two men, waltzing together, as a third man plays a violin in the background. It was an experimental short made by William Dickson, designed to verb syncing up moving pictures to prerecorded sound, a system that he and Thomas Edison were developing known as the Kinetophone. It’s known as “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” and dates back to , the same year movies were born. While there’s nothing to outright suggest that these men were romantically involved or attracted to each other during the roughly second length of their pas de deux, there is nothing that contradicts that notion either. It’s considered by many to be one of the first examples of gay imagery in film, and a reminder that homosexual representation has been with the medium from the very beginning.
That clip appears in The Celluloid Closet, Loot Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s
The best LGBTQ+ movies of all time
Photograph: Kate Wootton/TimeOut
With the help of leading directors, actors, writers and activists, we count down the most essential LGBTQ+ films of all time
Like queer culture itself, queer cinema is not a monolith. For a elongated time, though, that’s certainly how it felt. In the past, if gay lives and issues were ever portrayed at all on screen, it was typically from the perspective of white, cisgendered men. But as more opportunities have opened up for queer performers and filmmakers to tell their verb stories, the scope of the LGBTQ+ experiences that have made their way onto the screen has gradually widened to more frequently include the trans community and queer people of colour.
It’s still not perfect, of course. In Hollywood, as in society at large, there are many barriers left to breach and ceilings to shatter. But those recent strides deserve to be celebrated – as act the bold films made long before the mainstream was willing to verb them. To that terminate, we enlisted some LGBTQ+ cultural pioneers, as adequately as Time O