Gay Male Movie List
From 'Bessie' to 'Rafiki' and 'The Skinny,' these films are an indelible part of the queer canon. Black LGBTQ+ stories have become more visible in recent years, as daring creatives and unforgettable characters continue breaking through a white-dominated movie industry. From documentaries and biopics, to romantic comedies and dramas, this unranked list of films are a testament to the beauty and complexity of the Black LGBTQ+ experience, all of which we consider a part of the queer film canon.
gay male movie list
This film explores the secret tribal ceremonies practiced amongst the Xhosa people in South Africa, where boys become men after undergoing circumcision, and receive spiritual and cultural mentoring from male elders. Two of the mentors have a romantic history, and one of them unwittingly gets assigned to a boy who is gay, presenting something of a complex dynamic as the rituals continue at a remote camp.
In the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian (Cheryl Dunye), Watermelon Woman depicts a lesbian woman and movie enthusiast who works in a video store. After discovering and taking exception to how Black women are uncredited or depicted as stereotypes in films throughout history, she makes it her mission to learn more about one actress who was only noted as "The Watermelon Woman."
Mississippi Damned features three siblings who each confront their family's generational traumas and whether or not they'll choose to lead lives that break the cycle. The movie takes a look at their lives as children in 1986, and then skips 12 years into the future. Among the characters is Leigh, a lesbian who isn't out and struggles with the news that her girlfriend is marrying a man. Tessa Thompson also stars in Mississippi Damned, which is directed by Black lesbian film maker and screenwriter Tina Mabry.
The Skinny depicts five college friends, including four gay men and a lesbian woman, who get together for Pride in New York City. The otherwise pleasant reunion turns into a wild weekend that brings out the best and the worst in the group's friendship dynamics in this Patrik-Ian Polk-directed film. Jussie Smollett stars in the movie.
The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality and persecuted gay men between 1933 and 1945. As part of this campaign, the Nazi regime closed gay bars and meeting places, dissolved gay associations, and shuttered gay presses. The Nazi regime also arrested and tried tens of thousands of gay men using Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code. Uncovering the histories of gay men during the Nazi era was difficult for much of the twentieth century because of continued prejudice against same-sex sexuality and the postwar German enforcement of Paragraph 175.
The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality between 1933 and 1945. This campaign persecuted men who had sexual relations with other men. It is unclear how many of these men publicly or privately identified as gay or were part of gay communities and networks that had been established in Germany before the Nazi rise to power.
A Gay Happy Ending for All It's never a bad time to kick your feet up and watch a movie that celebrates queer love and joy. That's right -- not every gay movie has to end with heartbreak. So grab some popcorn, track down the remote, and get comfy. Here are 14 movies that will make you believe in happily ever after, along with where to stream them.
Women swooned at the mere sight of 6'3" ruggedly handsome leading man Rock Hudson. He was the top male box office draw in the '50s, starring with such icons as Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day in dramas and comedies. When Hudson was 30 years old, he married Phyllis Gates, a union that lasted 3 years, until 1958. Hudson never discussed his sexuality, although many of his co-stars claimed he was gay. After his death from AIDS-related complications in 1985 at age 60, his long-time lover Marc Christian successfully sued his estate. Hudson is credited with bringing the AIDS epidemic to the forefront and gaining the attention and research it deserved.
Hailed as the first iconic gay movie star, Wrangler was married to a woman he called the love of his life for his final years. He married singer Margaret Whiting in 1994 and after he gave up acting, he produced musicals for her to star in. He never made a secret of his sexuality, although he was criticized by his fans for "turning straight" when he married Whiting. His famous quote about his sexuality was, "I'm gay, but I could never live a gay lifestyle, because I'm much too competitive." Wrangler died from emphysema in New York City in 2009.
Few countries can rival the UK when it comes to making great and diverse gay films. This may come as a surprise from a country where male homosexuality was illegal until as recently as 1967, and where gay marriage continues to ruffle right-wingers, swivel-eyed or otherwise. Yet despite their often taboo nature, films with gay characters have been around since the silent era.
In this zingy comedy, based on the 1933 German film Viktor und Viktoria, Matthews plays a woman who earns her coin pretending to be a man who masquerades as a female impersonator. Matthews is fantastic, but Hale matches her as her supportive mentor, himself a drag queen, who at last gets his moment in the spotlight in an unforgettable final number. The story was adapted again in 1982 as Victor Victoria, starring Julie Andrews in the lead.
Comic Books Anderson: Psi-Division: In "Half-Life", a transparently gay television host on pre-apocalypse Deadworld makes a pass at Judge Death during a live show because he likes the uniform. This pisses off Death enough that he immediately executes him.
Moondragon's death in Marvel's Annihilation: Conquest series. Considering how many characters died in the series, what makes Moondragon's treatment notable was the sheer brutality of it. In Annihilation, Thanos kidnaps her, uses her as a hostage, rips her ear off, and presents the ear to her lover Phyla. She survives that series, but in Conquest she finds herself permanently turned into a dragon before ultimately dying in a Heroic Sacrifice to protect Phyla. In a cruel twist, Moondragon later gets resurrected, just in time for Phyla to get Killed Off for Real during The Thanos Imperative. What makes it particularly annoying is that with Thanos, Star-Lord, Drax, and now Nova all having been brought back, Phyla's death is the only one that's stuck.
Subverted in Birds of Prey, where one of the later arcs looked like it was playing this straight, seemingly killing off both Savant and Creote, two of the Birds' allies who were both in love with each other but hadn't gotten around to saying it. It turns out to be part of a plan to corner Oracle as Savant, who's suffering constant mental agony, plans to commit suicide and force her to watch. Creote had promised to help him die to put an end to his mental issues, but Oracle's able to convince them both to live. It's somewhat notable as this drew ire from the LGBT community, who had previously held the writer, Gail Simone, to Creator Worship levels, and the amount of backlash she got as a result of angry fans who didn't wait until the story had wrapped up led to her leaving previous community sites she heavily contributed to.
In Bloodstrike, Kennedy Marx's origins involve this trope. Her abusive boyfriend caught her in bed with another woman, sliced the other woman apart while Kennedy was Forced to Watch, and then bludgeoned Kennedy herself to death with a bowling ball. As luck would have it, she had latent superpowers, so her remains were claimed by Project Born Again, which resurrected her to serve as the second Fourplay.
Played With in regards to Invincible. The Wonder Woman Wannabe, War Woman, it's a lesbian woman who is in a relationship with an unnamed partner. She is brutally killed off by Omni-man in issue 7 alongside the Guardians of the Globe. Other than her, there are only two named characters in the comic which are Rick Sheridan and William Clockwell, who are in a relationship, but are Demoted to Extra, giving the comic's LGBT representation little focus.
In Blue Is the Warmest Color, Clementine, the lesbian protagonist, dies at the end.
In a similar subversion, there was the Civil War: Runaways/Young Avengers team-up, where the Warden of the Cube has the brainwashed Noh-Var sent to bring in the Runaways. Being a super-powerful Kree Super Soldier, he's able to take down most of the team and starts the fight by attacking Xavin, Karolina, Wiccan, and Hulkling first and disabling each of them in a single hit, snapping Xavin's neck in doing so and seemingly killing them, while their body and the other three are taken to the Cube to be tortured. This gets kinda iffy, however, as Karolina is a lesbian, Xavin is her lover who's gender fluid (though during the story was taking the form of male), and Wiccan and Hulkling are one of Marvel's most prominent gay couples. While they all make it out alive, we are treated to a disturbing scene of Wiccan being forced to watch Teddy get cut up and vivisected while unable to do anything to stop it.
John Arcudi's run on Doom Patrol ended with the revelation that sometime after the end of Rachel Pollack's run on the series, Coagula, one of the only transgender superheroines in mainstream comics, was killed off by teammate Dorothy Spinner, for no other purpose than to make Robotman sad and create a premise to kill Dorothy. The two remained dead until DC's 2022 Pride special, where writers Devin Grayson and Jude Deluca brought both characters back.
Terry Moore's various series often deal with human sexuality in a mature and intelligent fashion, exploring what might force a person to reassess their self-identification and what impact societal pressures and expectations have on human desires, but when Echo needs to show its villain beginning to lose his grasp on his sanity and begin to break down he kills his boyfriend to keep him from leaving.
In Empowered, Mind*@%! dies; while her erstwhile girlfriend Sistah Spooky blew up her superheroic careernote (even presuming that her powers are intact and she can restore her arm) in a suicidal plan to rescue or ransom her from Hell.
Sunfire, a lesbian alternate version of Mariko Yashida and member of Exiles, is brutally slaughtered by a Brood-infected Mimic solely to kick off a sequence of events that saw Mimic demoted out of leadership of the team and Blink returning to become the new leader.
Marvel's Freedom Ring defied nearly all the gay stereotypes... other than the one about being allowed to live happily. Killed off within a month of Marvel E.I.C Joe Quesada touting him as the company's top gay hero. Word of God is that Freedom Ring "was always planned as an inexperienced hero who would get beaten up constantly and probably die. I wanted to comment on the fact that most superheroes get their powers and are okay at it... and that's not how life works. During working on the book, I was also noticing that most gay characters... are all about being gay. Straight characters are well-rounded characters who like chicks. So I wanted to do a well-rounded character who just happened to like dudes. Then I decided to combine the two ideas." Oops. Robert Kirkman did apologize when he realized he had effectively killed off 20% of Marvel's gay male characters.
Subverted in The Multiversity, where it seems Red Racer, a gay Flash equivalent from Earth 36, will sacrifice himself as a homage to Crisis on Infinite Earths but instead comes back alive with an army of Flashes from across the Multiverse. Played completely straight in the follow-up Multiplicity from Superman (Rebirth), where he alone dies in the exact same way.
In The Order (2007), Henry Hellrung is forced to kill lesbian Mulholland Black after her powers go out of control.
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga had no problem killing The Brand, cutting off her story arc far too soon. Meanwhile, the way she died added no dignity to the moment.
Knockout, one of the bad guys in DC's fantastic Secret Six died essentially offscreen between the first mini-series and the ongoing comic. Her lover Scandal Savage is left devastated although thankfully not insane or any more evil than before. Knockout was a "New God" and killed off with the rest in the Final Crisis arc, so it gets a pass as her death didn't come off like such an afterthought within the confines of someone else's comic book or because of her lesbian relationship, and the writer, Gail Simone, was not happy that the character had to die. It also helps that in the finale of Secret Six they go to Hell and get Knockout back, and it's shown in the reboot version of the series that she's in a quite happy three-way marriage with Scandal and Liana, with a plan to start a family.
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