50 best gay movies
55 of the Best LGBTQ Films of All Time
'Bottoms' ()
If ever there was a Superbad for gay girls, Bottoms is it. The second film from director Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby) follows two uncool high school seniors (Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) who start up a school fight club to try and hook up with their cheerleader crushes (Kaia Gerber and Havana Rose Liu).
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'Bound' ()
In the Wachowskis’ landmark erotic thriller predating the Matrix trilogy, butch ex-con Corky (Gina Gershon) is the newly-hired handyperson at an apartment building when she meets her next-door neighbors: mobster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) and kept miss Violet (Jennifer Tilly). As Corky and Violet strike up an affair, they hatch a plan to flee Violet’s abusive relationship—and steal $2 million of Caesar’s mafia money along the way.
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'Circus of Books' ()
Southern Californians will likely recognize Circus of Books as the famed porn shop and filthy bookstore that has presided over the gayborhood of West Hollywood since the e
The 50 Best LGBTQ+ Movies
50) The Living End ()
"Fuck The World." The motto of The Living End's protagonists might stand as a slogan for the whole of filmmaker Greg Araki's career. A key shitkicker in the early '90s Modern Queer Cinema movement, Araki took a baseball bat to hetero-normative culture and explored gay life on the margins during Bush's administration in films by turns funny, frank and anguished. The Living End is his best picture, a so-called 'gay Thelma & Louise', as production critic Jon (Craig Gilmore) and drifter Luke (Mike Dytri), both diagnosed as HIV-positive ("the Neo-Nazi Republican final solution," says Jon about AIDS), kill a homophobic cop and travel on the lam, offing any bigot who rise in their way. Rather than pity themselves, these characters unleash their nihilism on the world, tempered by a kind of freewheeling anarchy and enhanced by Araki's eye-catching images and jump cuts. As the film's dedication puts it, it's a punch in the gut to "a Big White Residence full of Republic
The 50 Best LGBTQ Movies Ever Made
Love, Simon ()
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If it feels a bit like a CW version of an after-school special, that's no mistake: Teen-tv super-producer Greg Berlanti makes his feature-film directorial debut here. It's as chaste a love story as you're likely to see in the 21st century—the hunky gardener who makes the title teen question his sexuality is wearing a long-sleeved shirt, for God’s sake—but you know what? The queer kids of the future need their wholesome entertainment, too.
Rocketman ()
AmazonHulu
A gay fantasia on Elton themes. An Elton John biopic was never going to be understated, but this glittering jukebox musical goes way over the top and then keeps going. It might be an overcorrection from the straight-washing of the previous year's Bohemian Rhapsody, but when it's this much fun, it's best not to overthink it.
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Handsome Devil ()
NetflixAmazon
A charming Irish film that answers the question: "What if John Hughes were Irish and gay?" Misfit Ned struggles at
The best LGBTQ+ movies of all time
Photograph: Kate Wootton/TimeOut
With the assist of leading directors, actors, writers and activists, we count down the most essential LGBTQ+ films of all time
Like queer identity itself, queer cinema is not a monolith. For a extended 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 light, cisgendered men. But as more opportunities have opened up for queer performers and filmmakers to tell their own stories, the scope of the LGBTQ+ experiences that have made their way onto the screen has gradually widened to more frequently comprise the trans community and gender non-conforming people of colour.
It’s still not perfect, of course. In Hollywood, as in society at big, there are many barriers left to breach and ceilings to shatter. But those recent strides deserve to be celebrated – as do the bold films made long before the mainstream was willing to accept them. To that end, we enlisted some LGBTQ+ cultural pioneers, as well as Time O