There’s a lot of history to explore, and there’s never been a better time to do it. While gay characters tended until much too recently to be one-dimensional, white, and doomed, in 2018 Barry Jenkins won a Best Picture Oscar telling the layered and hopeful story of a gay Black man in Moonlight.
1982’s tentative Making Love derailed the careers of its two lead actors 2017’s Call Me By Your Name cemented its pair as movie stars. In celebration of Sunday’s Academy Awards, Mr. Though apparently attracted to the free-spirited Ivan, Windson insists on limiting their. A curious friendship blossoms between the two involving many episodes of nude wrestling, swimming, embracing and sharing a bed.
The range runs from the shoestring brilliance of The Watermelon Woman to the big-budget glitter-bomb that is Rocketman. It’s rare for actors to go full monty in films even rarer on television. The quintessential 80s lesbian romantic drama, Desert Hearts follows an English professor and a young sculptor as they fall in love at a Nevada ranch in the 1950s. After entering the gay world, Ivan meets Windson, who professes to be straight. We’ve come a ways in fifty years, from the self-loathing middle-aged men of The Boys In The Band to the peppy teens of Love, Simon. The conditions are optimal for you to catch up on your queer cinema. Tom Shkolnik’s beautifully observed The Comedian (2012), in which a possibly gay, possibly bi thirtysomething (Edward Hogg) tries to make it as a standup in the capital, also narrowly missed inclusion. The few bars that have reopened are for the reckless and foolish, and let's be honest: there’s only so much dancing a person can do on Zoom. We’re stuck inside unless we’re marching for police reform. This year, the public events of LGBTQ Pride Month-much like sports, school, and life itself-are cancelled.
And if you can bear the crowds, you leave a Pride festival with a draft-beer buzz, an application for a rainbow-flag credit card, and a paper fan with Chelsea Handler’s face on it. Your bank, cable company and sandwich shop rush to remind you of their support for the LGBTQ+ community. The gay neighborhood thumps with house music. Under normal circumstances, June busts out all over with Pride Month parties and parades. The good news: this year you have time for some movies.