Anyone interested in gay experience or gay films already knows to distrust mainstream media’s efforts to exploit and categorize queerness by promoting gay movies as different, and each so-called advance as a breakthrough simply because it finally breaks into the media’s usual indifference.Īs the Hollywood film industry goes through its biggest sexual panic since the 1920s, reflecting a breakdown in heterosexual relations, gay filmmakers who previously were swept to the margins by cowardly homophobic critics and gatekeepers, have steadily made the only movies concerned with what it means to be human among humans.Įach of these twelve superb films transcend Hollywood’s condescending approach to gay self-pity disguised as romance.
It’s a privilege to chronicle this advance of queer cinema that now dominates movie culture for the first time in film history.īut these twelve pioneering films are not the ones that got the most media attention. Gay filmmaking no longer has to “go mainstream” because, for the past few years, the best new movies have been gay movies.
