Do agree that Brokeback Mountain is a good one. It's a beautiful story and of course, anything with Heath Ledger is going to be fabulous (gods do I miss that man...). It hit me super hard in the feels a few times, though. There are some intense things going on in that movie. ;-;
For horror lovers out there, I wish to recommend the new Hellraiser 2022 movie. It's considered "queer horror" because the actress playing Pinhead is a transwoman. <3 She's positively perfect. There's also a cute gay couple in the movie. My number one complaint is that the main character who messes with the puzzle box...sucks. I hate her, lmao. She's so stupid and I was constantly wishing she would fail. But everything else about the movie was pretty great to me.
Another goodie is To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. This movie is super important to me because it's educational in fun, beautiful, and creative ways. You learn so much through the perspectives and knowledge of these characters. If I remember right too, it's the first Hollywood movie to focus on drag queens specifically. And like, Wesley Snipes stars in it. And he's a method actor. So. Yeah I appreciated the fuck out of that right next to Patrick Swayze being a badass queen. Like dayum. <3
Also, I can tell that this will be a favorite thing the moment I get access to it. I cannot see how this could do any wrong whatsoever:
*The Lord of the Rings* is super queer, and among pretty much everyone's favourites (including mine). Also another of my favourite movies is an old Italian Jesus movie, Pier Paolo Pasolini's *Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo* -- important to note that Pasolini made the film with no small amount of reverence, but he himself was an openly gay communist, for which he may have been assassinated. One of my favourite filmmakers in general, Pasolini -- apparently he helped write Fellini's *La Dolce Vita*, too, which is another of my favourites, though that film, while having no small amount of queerness in its, strikes me as a bit more ambivalent. Ooh, and another of my all-time favourites, and one I think is kinda underrated: the Wachowskis' *Cloud Atlas*! Now that is much, much more explicitly queer, with one of its central narratives being a gay romance, and its overarching theme of metamorphosis.
Well, those are the films I consider my favourites that are explicitly queer. I dunno -- there's a universality to modern notions of queerness that gives a lot of great films potential to be queer, despite not being conventionally considered as such. Glancing at a few more of my favourites, Ingmar Bergman's *Fanny and Alexander* could be queer in highlighting the resistance of the main characters to religious fundamentalism, despite none of the characters being outright queer; Andrei Tarkovsky's *Andrei Rublev*, too, yet another deeply religious film, feels especially queer to me due to how it values brotherly love, in a manner similar to *The Lord of the Rings*; and I do think one can reasonably read as queer much of the longing in Hayao Miyazaki's body of work.
Though going back to media that's explicitly queer, I gotta mention my longstanding loves, *Adventure Time* and *Steven Universe*, which have had parts released as films, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning *Angels in America*, a play about people in New York living through the AIDS crisis, released as a miniseries/six-hour film back in 2003. I don't necessarily think of those shows as films, though, so they're at the end of this list.
I basically recommend all these films and shows mentioned here, and if you're getting into writing or film or queer studies, you'll probably *have* to get into at least one of them at some point. Might as well start now <3
To Wong Foo is def high there as a favorite but I also LOVE LOVE LOVE, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Birdcage.
o course these are all very old now, and the only ones I can think of I'm SURE I've seen a ton more recent ones, but I think because queer culture is now so normalized (for me), it doesn't stand out to me the way it did back in the 90s
I recently watched Rosie (2022) which is a Canadian film about a little indigenous girl being adopted by her francophone, Quebecois auntie and her best friends who are two-spirit drag queens. I thought it was really beautiful and touched a lot on how for people in the queer community, sometimes you just have to choose your family instead of trying to force yourself to stay with the family you were born with, for your own sake. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it, especially for people like me who love the found family trope :D
To Wong Foo is def high there as a favorite but I also LOVE LOVE LOVE, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Birdcage.
o course these are all very old now, and the only ones I can think of I'm SURE I've seen a ton more recent ones, but I think because queer culture is now so normalized (for me), it doesn't stand out to me the way it did back in the 90s
I really wanna watch *Priscilla* at some point! I just kinda ran out of time soon after watching *Paris Is Burning* xD I hear that the scene where the queens entertain an aboriginal group by lip-syncing to *I Will Survive* is an incredibly potent highlight though.
There's also a cute gay couple in the movie. My number one complaint is that the main character who messes with the puzzle box...sucks. I hate her, lmao. She's so stupid and I was constantly wishing she would fail. But everything else about the movie was pretty great to me.
I'm SURE I've seen a ton more recent ones, but I think because queer culture is now so normalized (for me), it doesn't stand out to me the way it did back in the 90s
