50 Favorite Gay Movies of All Time [Hitlist]

We’re on the final 10 films to close the list!

Closet Monster (2016) – Canada

A fresh take on the coming-of-age story, this surreal tale follows the artistically driven Oscar (American Crime’s Connor Jessup) hovering on the brink of adulthood. Struggling to find his place in the world after a rough childhood and haunted by images of a tragic incident, Oscar dreams of escaping his small town. After he meets a mysterious and attractive new co-worker, Oscar follows the guidance of his pet hamster Buffy (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) and faces his demons to find the life he wants.

I would think of Connor Jessup as one of the most talented among his batch and being gay – which he has admitted in 2019 – only makes him an even more attractive young man.

I knew I was gay when I was thirteen, but I hid it for years. I folded it and slipped it under the rest of my emotional clutter. Not worth the hassle. No one will care anyway. If I can just keep making it smaller, smaller, smaller… My shame took the form of a shrug, but it was a shame. I’m a white, cis man from an upper-middle-class liberal family. Acceptance was never a question. But still, suspended in all this privilege, I balked. It took me years. It’s ongoing. I’m saying this now because I have conspicuously not said it before. I’ve been out for years in my private life, but never quite publicly. I’ve played that tedious game. Most painfully, I’ve talked about the gay characters I’ve played from a neutral, almost anthropological distance as if they were separate from me. |source|

La mala Educacion (2004) – Spain

When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer (Gael García Bernal) who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.

Moonlight (2016) – USA

Chiron, a young African-American boy, finds guidance in Juan, a drug dealer, who teaches him to carve his own path. As he grows up in Miami, Juan’s advice leaves a lasting impression on him. Moonlight received critical acclaim and is commonly cited as one of the best films of the 21st century. The film won several accolades, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with Best Supporting Actor for Ali and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins and McCraney from a total of eight nominations. It became the first film with an all-black cast, the first LGBTQ-related film, and the second-lowest-grossing film domestically (behind The Hurt Locker) to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

An article in The New Yorker about Moonlight is worth reading:

“Moonlight” undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds, real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance. |source|

A Touch of Fever (1993) – Japan

A young male prostitute struggles with unrequited feelings of love for his roommate, who also works as a rent boy but is unwilling to admit that he is gay. A Touch of Fever (Hatachi no Binetsu) is a Japanese film directed by Ryosuke Hashiguchi, starring Yoshihiko Hakamada and Masashi Endō. It was released in 1993. It was shot on 16-millimeter film with a small budget and no payment for the actors or the director. It was awarded a PFF Scholarship (which supports the production of one film for theatrical release each year). It was then screened at the Berlin Film Festival.

Maurice (1987) – UK

Says The British Film Institute:

The film tells the tale of Maurice (James Wilby), a man who falls in love with two very different men – upper-class Clive (Hugh Grant) and gamekeeper Scudder (Rupert Graves) – at a time when male homosexuality was illegal (same-sex relationships would not be partially decriminalized until 1967). |source|

Three years ago, this film celebrated its 30th year. The Guardian’s Guy Lodge wrote:

Fast-forward to 2017, in the midst of a thriving LGBT cinema scene and in afterglow of Moonlight’s barrier-busting Oscar triumph, and perhaps audiences will be a little warmer, a little kinder to Maurice. Coincidentally, it hits screens again in the same year that Ivory is basking in the glory of a very different LGBT triumph: now 88, he’s a co-writer on Luca Guadagnino’s queer coming-of-age rhapsody Call Me By Your Name, a Sundance sensation that realises the first rush of gay love with all the woozy sensual excess that Maurice, true to its period, eschews. (They’d make for a remarkable, mutually flattering double bill.) Far from dated, Merchant Ivory’s Maurice looks positively ahead of its time: an honestly strait-laced depiction of alternative sexuality that dared to play by the same rules as any other respectable costume drama. |source|

Malila: The Farewell Flower มะลิลา (2017) – Thailand

Says Sara Ward at The Screen Daily:

Jumping from poetic parallels to hallucinatory interludes with rotting bodies, embracing a broad spectrum of attitudes to mortality and filling the frame with detailed greenery might sound like the domain of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Yet writer/director Anucha Boonyawatana not only follows confidently and elegantly in his footsteps, but makes her own lasting imprint. Still, evident similarities between the compatriots should help boost Malila’s appeal with festival audiences following its Busan premiere, as should the movie’s gentle queer romance, Boonyawatana’s second in as many efforts after 2015’s The Blue Hour. |source|

The Wedding Banquet (1993) – Hongkong

Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) and his boyfriend (Mitchell Lichtenstein) live happily as a gay couple in New York City. Wai-Tung has not been open about his sexuality with his Taiwanese parents (Sihung Lung, Ah-Leh Gua), and decides to acquiesce to their wish for a traditional Chinese union by marrying Wei-Wei (May Chin), a struggling artist desperate for a green card. But the simple arrangement turns into a lavish debacle when Wai-Tung’s parents plan an extravagant wedding banquet.

Saint Laurent (2014) – France

Born in Algeria, Yves Saint Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) moves to France and utilizes his creativity to become an icon of the fashion industry.

One of the greatest designers that ever lived, as well as a symbol for the (hallucinogenic, economic, sexual) excesses of the 70s, Monsieur Saint Laurent has inspired more than his share of mythology. Dozens of books chronicle his work, and he’s been the subject of three films in the past three years alone. Bonello’s is the most recent to take on the couturier, featuring the alarmingly handsome actor and Chanel model Gaspard Ulliel in the title role. A convincing physical match, Ulliel had already been approached by Gus Van Sant to play Saint Laurent. Van Sant never made his film, but Gaspard slipped into those iconic glasses not long afterward for Bonello. |source|

Tropical Malady (Satpralat) (2004) – Thailand

Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) is a soldier stationed in a quiet Thai village where the days progress with methodical slowness. Not much happens of interest until Keng encounters local boy Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), and the pair begin a tentative romance. Then, in a surreal move typical of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the film splinters into a story about a soldier (also Lomnoi) searching for a lost boy in the jungle and meeting a vexing spirit (also Kaewbuadee). At the press screening at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, several audience members left before the film was over and some of those who stayed until the end booed it. The film received generally poor reviews from such industry journals as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter but then won the Jury Prize from the jury, headed by Quentin Tarantino. Deborah Young of Variety stated in May 2004, it had a “weakly structured story” and “its loosely connected scenes will sorely try the patience of most viewers”.Manohla Dargis from The New York Times on Oct 2004 noted it was “unabashedly strange” and this is a “young filmmaker pushing at the limits of cinematic narrative with grace and a certain amount of puckish willfulness”

And so we end this list with an AIDS themed film! While Philadelphia paves the way for more films that tackle AIDS, Dallas Buyers Club is an eye-opener exposing the limitations of the American initiative to combat the deadly virus.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013) – USA

The film tells the story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), an AIDS patient diagnosed in the mid-1980s when HIV/AIDS treatments were under-researched, while the disease was not understood and highly stigmatized. As part of the experimental AIDS treatment movement, he smuggled unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas for treating his symptoms and distributed them to fellow people with AIDS by establishing the “Dallas Buyers Club” while facing opposition from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Two fictional supporting characters, Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner), and Rayon (Jared Leto), were composite roles created from the writers’ interviews with transgender AIDS patients, activists, and doctors. Presidential biographer and PEN-USA winner Bill Minutaglio wrote the first magazine profile of The Dallas Buyers Club in 1992. The article, which featured interviews with Woodroof and also recreated his dramatic international exploits, attracted widespread attention from filmmakers and journalists. Lead actor Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.

Of course, 50 gay films are not enough nor this list is all-encompassing. There are plenty more to add – especially LGBTQ+ specific genres like Carol, Blue is the Warmest Color, Boys Don’t Cry, and many more. That would be another hitlist to feature! However, I felt that the 50 films on this list represent many tales about being gay.

How about you? Do you have any particular gay films you want to recommend? Let us know what you think!