The Fifty Greatest Gay Movies!

2. Beautiful Thing (1996)

What is it about this little U.K. charmer that has turned it into such a gay classic? The answer may be its subject matter: gay teens. This 1996 film was the first in a virtual tidal wave of movies and books in which the sensitive teen misfit with a best female friend falls for the jock who turns out to be gay. But hey, haven’t most of us been there, on one side or other of the misfit/jock divide? This movie, based on a stage play by Jonathan Harvey (who also wrote the film’s screenplay), was originally intended for television, but it was so successful that the producers decided to give it a theatrical release. And let’s not forget the inspired soundtrack of Mama Cass songs — an example of a perfect fit between music and movie subject matter. Make your own kind of music, indeed.

3. Shelter (2007)

There are “sleeper” films, and then there is Shelter. This small indie film received a very limited theatrical release in the spring of 2007 with a television debut on the subscription-only here! network only a month later. And suddenly, it was all anyone could talk about. Plenty of folks deemed it “the gay surfer movie,” but it’s ultimately as much about surfing as Brokeback Mountain is about animal husbandry. Instead, Shelter is a riveting family drama and a story of first gay love set in a working class world. Starring Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss’s Brad Rowe in a career-reviving performance and newcomer Trevor Wright, there are no gay bars in Shelter, no drugs, no drag queens, no circuit anthems, no gay-bashings, no AIDS scares, and no screaming parents to speak of. And we gay folks loved it anyway. Or maybe, because it was so fresh and different, that’s why we loved it.

4. Latter Days (2003)

Talk about opposites attracting! A gay party animal falls in love with … a Mormon missionary? This plotline, previously consigned solely to porno movies, could have easily descended into sitcom-level sentiment or Old Couple-like cliché. But the makers of this movie knew better, starting with the fact that both party-boy Christian (Wes Ramsey) and missionary Aaron (Steve Sandvoss, in a role he was born to play) are never stereotypes. That plot kicks off when Christian’s friends bet him $50 that he can’t bed one of the Mormon missionaries in the apartment across from him.

It turns out he can, but at what cost? This wonderful movie shows love at its complicated, messy best. It also dared to take on the Mormon Church’s bigoted and often hypocritical stand on homosexuality, making the film enormously controversial upon its 2003 release.

5. Maurice (1987)

Author E. M. Forster knew the novel he began in 1913 about a British aristocrat and his love affair with a male gardener would be very controversial if it had been published in his lifetime, especially given that he insisted on giving it a happy ending. The novel was finally published posthumously in 1971, but the subject matter was still a hard sell when producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, real-life same-sex partners, decided to turn the book into one of their trademark lavish period films. Marshaling the clout they’d earned from 1985’s Oscar-winning A Room With a View, they produced this 1987 masterpiece, the world’s first big budget gay period film. Hugh Grant is wonderful in stuffed-shirt mode, but the movie really belongs to James Wilby, who is superb as Maurice, and Rupert Graves as Alec, the World’s Hottest Stable Boy. For most gay viewers, that amazing nude bedroom scene is still fused directly onto our corneas.