What are your top 10 gay movies for Pride month?

[David]

I’m a fan of Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011). The cast of stage-trained young actors does superb work—they carry the narrative burden, the poetry burden, and the emotional burden like old pros. The result isn’t stuffy or amateurish or in any way miscalculated; it’s euphoric. Despite its being set in a military academy during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, politics is blessedly kept to a minimum in favor of accessible and ultimately memorable storytelling. I highly, highly recommend.

I’m not crazy about a lot of the movies with gay texts or subtexts that draw everyone’s attention, like Visconti’s Death in Venice, the Jean Genet movie A Song of Love, Tea and Sympathy, King Ludwig (the Ken Russell nonsense, whatever its actual title is), Jarman’s Tempest and Caravaggio, Prospero’s Books, and the prestige stuff like Victoria/Victoria (most of which toys timidly with its themes). There’s a John Butler movie called Handsome Devil, filmed in Ireland and featuring a great rock soundtrack—the movie is pretty good but just doesn’t really dig in. It’s like Chariots of Fire or Rocky at the end, with a heaving sense of uplift to send everyone out of the theater skipping.

Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising is comically first-rate. I forgot about that one.

[TrueFaith77]

Originally Posted by David

I’m a fan of Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011). The cast of stage-trained young actors does superb work—they carry the narrative burden, the poetry burden, and the emotional burden like old pros. The result isn’t stuffy or amateurish or in any way miscalculated...

I’m not crazy about a lot of the movies with gay texts or subtexts that draw everyone’s attention, like Visconti’s Death in Venice, the Jean Genet movie A Song of Love, Tea and Sympathy, King Ludwig (the Ken Russell nonsense, whatever its actual title is), Jarman’s Tempest and Caravaggio, Prospero’s Books, and the prestige stuff like Victoria/Victoria (most of which toys timidly with its themes). There’s a John Butler movie called Handsome Devil.

Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising is comically first-rate. I forgot about that one.

Def will check out Romeo—it helps to acknowledge Shakespeare. Thanks for the tip!

Love the Visconti Death in Venice!

I admire Jarman, especially his recently released lost film, but he doesn’t fulfill the ideal of gay cinema I express above—I seek the Griffith impulse, extending the expressive means of medium but as a bid to popular appeal. Hence Genet’s experimentation is fulfilled in Fassbinder’s accessible sensual Fantasia with Querrelle. Both artists transcended.

I have had this disagreement with friends but Tea & Sympathy is about a heterosexual boy whose art is insufficiently empathetic—as expressed in the Minnelli ending as pure cinema. It’s a great film. Just not a gay one.

[TrueFaith77]

Originally Posted by David

I’m a fan of Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011). The cast of stage-trained young actors does superb work—they carry the narrative burden, the poetry burden, and the emotional burden like old pros. The result isn’t stuffy or amateurish or in any way miscalculated; it’s euphoric. Despite its being set in a military academy during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, politics is blessedly kept to a minimum in favor of accessible and ultimately memorable storytelling. I highly, highly recommend.

The language and enthusiasm is, indeed, euphoric. The filmmaking, less so. Still, the staging is often inspired. The Prince breaking the CD is an example. Also, there is needed wish-fulfillment, not just in the happy ending, but the reconciliation of Mercutio and Tybalt is a dream of masculine sensitivity come true centuries in the hoping.

[TrueFaith77]

Originally Posted by David

I’m not crazy about a lot of the movies with gay texts or subtexts that draw everyone’s attention, like Visconti’s Death in Venice,

DEATH IN VENICE (Luchino Visconti, 1971)
What makes a “gay film” anyway? The career of Luchino Visconti complicates all of the connotations of that phrase, which suggests today’s gay ghetto distribution-exhibition model. He always connects desire and society, history and commerce with a luxurious—gay—attentiveness to masculine beauty and feminine mystery even in in the hetero milieus of his masterpieces (La Terra Trema, Bellissima, Senso, White Nights, and Rocco and His Brothers). These qualities combine with a cruel sense of fate to negotiate Visconti’s Marxist dialecticism and aristocratic nostalgia—which meet to angle his unorthodox approach to gay portraiture and queer sociology in his later work (The Damned, Conversation Piece, and Ludwig). Visconti's most overt contribution to gay cinema is his adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. With it, Visconti changes the medium (novella to film) and that of its artist-protagonist (author to composer). Doing so, he reconciles—and transcends—the aesthetic-philosophical debate (Apollo vs. Dionysus) articulated in the dialogue and plotting through the musicality of imagery (reinvigorating period films along with 70s landmarks McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Barry Lyndon, and The Story of Adele H.). A master at portraying sexual repression, Dirk Bogarde plays composer Gustav who calls for purity in art—a grieving father’s plaint—and mastery of the flesh. Gustav embarks to Venice from Germany to recover from a blow to his health and to his art philosophy. In cholera-ridden Venice, blond-haired blue-eyed waif Tadzio (Björn Andresen) fulfills Gustav’s aesthetics but rocks his philosophy by giving flesh to an ideal. He extends Plato's cave to the Christian revelation of the West's art heritage. Hence, I think the ending is misunderstood. Visconti affords equal beauty and grandeur to Gustav’s pathetic sacrifice—scored to Mahler—as his sublime last look at Tadzio, an unconsummated openness to passion realized in Gustav’s final stunted gesture. Through this film’s visualization of gay rapture—Gustav watching Tadzio wrestling on the beach—Visconti redeems the contingency of flesh. That is what makes a “gay film” a great film.

[Villavic]

Not in order:

1. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
2. Law of Desire (spanish movie, directed by Pedro Almodovar, starring a young Antonio Banderas)
3. And the Band Played On
4. Call Me By Your Name
5. The Crying Game
6. The Birdcage (though I've heard the original french version is far better, but I've not seen that).
7. The Bad Education (Almodovar's spanish movie with Gael Garcia Bernal)
8. Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss
9. Strawberry and Chocolate (an international-cuban movie about two friends; one gay and fierce communist, the other straight and fierce individualist; and how they come to love each other, in some way.)
10. Contracorriente (Undertow, peruvian movie. A "ghost" story about a married fisherman who struggles to reconcile his devotion to his male lover within the rigid traditions of his small town. The romance continues beyond life)

[mylittledemon]

The Crying Game actually breaks my heart

Here's a few movies within the genre that I truly loved:

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013)
Moonlight (2016)
A Single Man (2009)
Call Me By Your Name (2017)

[TrueFaith77]

I will update my list to a top 20 for 2020 and rewrite my Color Purple summary.

Can anyone guess what will take the #20 spot?

Does anyone care?