Fun gay movies
LGBTQ+ representation in film is at an all-time high and recent years have given us queer cinematic masterpieces such as Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Ammonite, A Single Man and Carol. Don’t get me wrong, these films absolutely require to be on your must-watch list, but queer people also deserve a little light-hearted amusing. We all know that, even in , the queer experience can be a difficult one and it’s vital that we see ourselves and our lives reflected back at us from the screen. It’s validating, it’s healing, and it showcases our stories to the world. But it’s also a little depressing. I’m tired of seeing queer stories that only end in heartbreak. Stories filled with death, dying, tragedy, and the harsh realities of a patriarchal, homophobic world pulling two people that love each other apart. We need to see more queer joy, more queer love that ends in marriage and children and growing old together or, at least, that doesn’t cease in despair. Queer people deserve to see their own possibilities on the screen and their own potential futures. W
Being queer is exhausting in a world which constantly villainizes it in various ways possible. It is a life of pride, but a difficult one. Sometimes one requires respite, to just unwind and unapologetically be themselves, not having to justify their identity or fight for the right to exist. When your entertainment is also focused on the stories of loss and tragedies, it becomes especially difficult to just escape the harsh realities for a while. So, here’s a list of ten films where tragedy doesn’t befall our gay protagonists when the film ends.
‘Crush’ () dir. Sammi Cohen
Crush is a coming-of-age romcom with a love triangle where the characters go through usual high university drama but everything light-heartedly ends without any tragedy. The plot twist? The central characters in the triangle are all queer. The Latinx representation and the queer representation both feel genuine with inside jokes and cultural references playing a role in shaping the humour. It isn’t the best script per se, but as a sweet romance, it’s the perfect cute and funny break from queer t
30 Essential LGBTQ+ Comedies
(Photo by © Gramercy/courtesy Everett Collection)
Queer culture is so many vibrant and lovely and rambunctious things, but often times when you’re wading through the history of queer cinema it can feel like a community defined by tragedy and unhappy endings. And while there is much to learn from and much to love about the many heavy gay dramas out there, we must also take time to celebrate and revel in the bright side of difference, which is why this list is all about the comedies. There is plenty of tenderness among these films to be sure, but there’s also Robin Williams doing a macho drag impersonation of John Wayne in The Birdcage and a pair of dirtbag girls just trying to scrape up enough cash for a beach trip in Never Goin&#; Back.
From the lo-fi beginnings of John Waters to New Queer Cinema to the present day wave of queer coming-of-age movies popping up on Netflix, queer comedy has gone from the underground to the mainstream. The pioneering work of stars like Divine and filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar paved the way for a family-
The best LGBTQ+ movies of all time
Photograph: Kate Wootton/TimeOut
With the verb 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 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 adj, 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 incorporate the trans community and queer people of colour.
It’s still not perfect, of course. In Hollywood, as in society at huge, 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