No spoilers here.
- Weekend- This beautiful, beautiful, beautiful movie is a story that every gay man lives, 20 or 30 times in our lives. You meet someone wonderful, and you spend an amazing weekend together where everything works. And then you leave each other.
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch- Until Weekend came along, this was my favorite movie, and has been so for 10 years. This amazing, hilarious and human look at love, gender and sexuality is as wonderful a movie as can exist.
- A Single Man- Tom Ford can’t do anything wrong, and when he creates a movie, every scene is a work of art. This story of a professor going through the emotions of losing a lover with no one to share his pain is poignant and visually and emotionally heartbreaking.
- Dog Day Afternoon- Discover Al Pacino before he was famous. If you’re wondering why this movie is on a list of gay movies, wait until the end.
- Beautiful Thing- I have an emotional connection to this movie mostly because it was the very first movie I saw where two gay boys found each other, fell in love, and had a family that was supportive of it. Of course, the Mama Cass soundtrack sure helps.
- Ma Vie En Rose- A young boy discovers he wants to be a girl. What follows is pure beauty.
- Paris Is Burning- If there is one documentary everyone should see to understand the marginalized gay world, this is it. Better yet, watch this movie and then read up on everything that it talks about, and you’ll understand gay activism, drag, Madonna, New York City, white people taking ownership of black culture, AIDS, and true heroes better.
- Brokeback Mountain- The most mainstream movie on the list. It’s a great story of closeted lovers.
- Rocky Horror Picture Show- Everything is allowed in this ridiculously horrible movie. But it’s so bad, it’s amazing. Like really amazing.
- Milk- For Americans, Milk is the first true gay activist. The fact that Sean Penn plays him here makes it great. It is emotional, raw, and beautiful.
- Angels In America- If you want to understand AIDS in the 80s and 90s, you can’t. But this movie can take you through the rollercoaster of emotions. It’s long (over 5 hours), but worth every minute.
- Heavenly Creatures- Kate Winslet as a hallucinating, murderous lesbian in New Zealand. Need I say more? Oh, and it’s directed by Peter Jackson.
- Pride- The unlikely true story of gays and mine workers collaborating for the rights of everybody. This movie will make you want to be an activist.
***I apologize for the Western-centricity of this selection. Unfortunately, I am not familiar enough with non-Anglophone, non-Western cinema to write about it.***
Posted in: Just another blog post
ohmyhappiness 
Alma
April 26, 2015
“Mädchen in Uniform” (1958, Germany/Austria) is one of my favorites. It’s about a girl in pre-WW2 Germany who is sent to a boarding school after her mother’s death and falls in love with her teacher. It’s based on a theater play by a lesbian playwright born in the late 1800s(!). Watching it today, it’s baffling how modern and tumblr activist-y the message is.
It makes me happy to think that, even back then, in the supposedly repressive and conservative early 1900s, material like this hit enough of a nerve with general audiences that not only was the play a hit, but two successful, well-received movies were made out of it (the first movie adaptation was released in 1931, but the pacing and acting are pretty old-fashioned compared to today’s standard, the ’58 one is much more enjoyable and looks gorgeous), one of which even starred Romy Schneider, one of the biggest movie stars in Germany at the time, as the lead.
Honorable mentions: That Googoosh music video with the lesbian couple, and Parvez Sharma’s documentary “A Jihad for Love”.
ohmyhappiness
April 26, 2015
Thanks for sharing. I’ll look those up ASAP.