To be considered for the list, a movie had to prominently feature gay, lesbian, trans, or queer characters concern itself centrally with LGBTQ+ themes present its LGBTQ+ characters in a fair and realistic light and/or be seen as a touchpoint in the evolution of queer cinema. When revising this list in further recent updates, we’ve also looked to include more stories from outside of the U.S., and we’re excited for people to discover films like Taboo (Gohatto), a gay love story set during the waning years of the samurai era The Wound (Inxeba), centered around three men during a tribal initiation ceremony in Africa and Australian film 52 Tuesdays, about the relationship between a daughter and her mother who is undergoing a gender transition.
In our latest thorough update to the list, we added titles like the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, about LGBTQ+ activists risking their lives for the cause in Russia Certified Fresh comedy Shiva, Baby and Netflix’s The Old Guard, a rare movie about super beings that showed a same-sex relationship between two of its heroes. There are broad American comedies ( The Birdcage), artful Korean crime dramas ( The Handmaiden), groundbreaking indies ( Tangerine), and landmark documentaries ( Paris Is Burning). Our list of the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time stretches back 90 years to the pioneering German film, Mädchen in Uniform, which was subsequently banned by the Nazis, and crosses multiple continents, cultures, and genres. Read: Critic Valerie Complex on Pariah, and how it changed her lifeĪll of these films stand on the shoulders of other LGBTQ+ films that have come before.Read: Critic Manuel Betancourt on seminal LGBTQ+ comedy The Birdcage.Read: Critic Ian Thomas Malone on seminal trans film A Fantastic Woman.Watch: Cinematographer James Laxton breaks down the swimming lesson from Moonlight.Meanwhile comedy Midas Judd Apatow is currently producing a gay rom-com starring Billy on the Street’s Billy Eichner, which will hit theaters in Summer 2022. And it wasn’t the last: A lesbian romance lies at the center of critically acclaimed high school flick, Booksmart, as well as last year’s Christmas rom-com, The Happiest Season.
In 2020, Pedro Almadóvar’s Pain and Glory would make a dent on the awards circuit, as would Celine Sciamma’s romance Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, one of the best-reviewed movies of recent years. Meanwhile, Love, Simon made history in 2018 as the first mainstream, wide-release teenage rom-com to focus on a gay character (a spin-off TV series, Love, Victor, enters its second season on Hulu this year). At the 2019 Oscars, Olivia Colman was named Best Actress for playing the lesbian queen Anne in The Favourite, beating out Can You Ever Forgive Me?‘s Melissa McCarthy, who played lesbian writer Lee Israel. In 2016, Carol earned six Oscar nominations, and just a year later, for the first time in history, Moonlight became the first LGBTQ+-themed movie to win Best Picture. That should be a hell of a read when that book hits shelves.It’s been a big few years for LGBTQ films. (But let’s not rule out a role in Back to the Beach 2, because Avalon is back in the acting game in 2016, so anything is possible.) Interestingly, Lockhart turned down a “small role” in King Cobra, citing his desire to eventually tell the story in his own words. In addition to being caught up in an insane murder plot, Lockhart was also underage when he was performing in his earliest films for Cobra Video, so it’s safe to say that Clayton’s days of being a modern Frankie Avalon are over. Garrett Clayton stars as Lockhart/Carrigan, and this is a far cry from his performance as Tanner in Disney’s Teen Beach Movie and Teen Beach 2. (Again, it’s a hell of a story and one paragraph hardly does it justice.) The entire story was told in the 2012 book Cobra Killer: Gay Porn Murder, and now it’s being adapted as King Cobra, which stars Christian Slater as “Stephen,” who is based on Kocis, and James Franco as Joe, or Joseph Kerekes, one of the murderers and aspiring porn kingpins. They wanted to make a film with Corrigan that would earn more money than any gay-porn movie in history, but - SPOILER ALERT - they’re in prison for life. Lockhart rose to fame in the gay-porn industry as Brent Corrigan, predominantly starring in films produced by Cobra Video, which was owned by Bryan Kocis, who was murdered by two male escorts and wannabe rival producers in 2007. The story of Sean Paul Lockhart is a truly bizarre one, which basically guarantees James Franco would get involved in the film version.