Swedish-Georgian writer-director Levan Akin returns with his third feature, a politically charged coming-of-age drama about a dancer in Tbilisi, Georgia, who slowly comes to terms with what it means to be gay within a traditional culture of dance in a staunchly conservative country. For the sake of avoiding potential major studio publicity stunts and conjecture on filmmakers’ purported sexual orientation, all of the films on this list were chosen because they have confirmed queer characters and/or plotlines central to the film. But there’s plenty to look forward to outside of that. So, there’s a lot of ground to be gained when it comes to widespread embrace and moving past falsely based corporatization of queerness.
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Of course, conglomerates like Disney (which assumedly still have too many outdated traditionalists in power to take significant steps forward) are trying to get the best of both worlds by touting a background kiss between two women in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker as if they made the next fucking Brokeback Mountain.
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More gay, trans, lesbian, and other queer projects are being bought at film festivals, greenlit by major studios, distributed to wider audiences, and celebrated by greater masses. As a more conservative, traditional world learns to embrace a beautiful reality in which anyone can love anyone, Hollywood seems to be revving its engines in anticipation (and by Hollywood, I mean Ryan Murphy, but we’ll get to that later). Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Wild Nights with Emily, Pain and Glory, Booksmart, and End of the Century are just a handful that prove the point. Queer film had quite the showing in 2019. Follow along as we explore all the things that have us mildly hopeful in the new year. Rather, consider this a primer that helps illustrate the relationship between queer culture and the silver screen.This is part of our 2020 Preview.
RECENT GAY MOVIES 2020 MOVIE
It is nowhere near a comprehensive rundown of every great movie to feature out-and-proud heroes and villains, or a queer sensibility, or even just visible (and/or risible) examples of gay life in cinema we could have easily made this list twice as long. In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month, we’re singling out 50 essential LGBTQ films - from comedies to dramas, documentaries to cult classics, underground experimental work to studio blockbusters. Some have been documents of a moment or era of gay history, some have been used as correctives to decades of negative clichés, and others have simply celebrated the fact that the movies can be queer, they’re here, get used to it. But since those two men first danced, there have also been scores of stories, characters, and filmmakers that have presented the varied, multitudinous aspects of LGBTQ experiences 24 frames per second that have gone past those stereotypes, or flipped them on their heads. That clip appears in The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary based on Vito Russo’s study of homosexuality in the movies, along with countless examples of how gay characters showed up, per narrator Lily Tomlin, as “something to laugh at, or something to pity, or even something to fear.” The history of representation is long, and extremely storied, often shaping how the public viewed “the love that dare not speak its name” for better or worse. It’s considered by many to be one of the first examples of gay imagery in film, and a reminder that homosexual representation has been with the medium from the very beginning. While there’s nothing to outright suggest that these men were romantically involved or attracted to each other during the roughly 20-second length of their pas de deux, there is nothing that contradicts that notion either. It’s known as “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” and dates back to 1895, the same year movies were born.
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It was an experimental short made by William Dickson, designed to test syncing up moving pictures to prerecorded sound, a system that he and Thomas Edison were developing known as the Kinetophone. But this brief footage is not so ancient that you can’t clearly make out two men, waltzing together, as a third man plays a violin in the background. It’s grainy, faded, and, given the clip is now 125 years old, more than a little worse for wear.