The LGBTQ+ community in the media has come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go for queer romances to be shown as often as their heterosexual counterparts. Director: Luca Guadagnino Stars: Armie Hammer, Timothe Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar. While the kiss wasn’t romantic-the moment was between young handsome soldier John Powell and his dying friend David Armstrong-it was still a major moment in the LGBTQ+ community as the first kiss between two men on screen.įast forward to 2020, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a network that doesn’t have a show with a romantic relationship between two characters of the same sex. In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father's research assistant. The first same-sex kiss was in the 1927 silent film, Wings, an Oscar-winning romance war movie, which showed two male soldiers kissing in the trenches of World War I.
Compared to heterosexual kisses in the media, of which there have been hundreds of thousands, same-sex relationships on screen have been historically underrepresented, so we took it upon ourselves to highlight 20 same-sex kisses that have changed TV and movie history for the better.
Since then, there have been dozens of gay kisses in TV shows and movies, but there needs to be more. “Everywhere you look someone’s omnisexual or transitioning,” says a sassy-straight-sidekick in Alex Strangelove.It’s been more than 90 years since the first same-sex kiss was seen on screen. In both cases, letting the gay hero thrive relies on an idealized-even parodic-progressive utopia. Shortly after that film’s release came the Netflix original Alex Strangelove, a livelier, raunchier, and more insightful attempt to retrofit the high-school comedy for a coming-out story. The intolerance around Simon is light and incidental mostly, he gets to look for love at the same house parties and county fairs as all his friends do. The appeal of the lightweight Love, Simon, though, was in imagining that a gay kid might fall comfortably into a familiar coming-of-age groove: occasionally mortifying, but never actually traumatic. Last year’s absorbing indie drama Beach Rats, for example, portrayed a closeted Brooklyn bro who (spoiler alert) helps his friends mug a guy he meets on a hookup site. This dynamic, of the bullied becoming the bully, is a common one on-screen.
In Moonlight, too, the protagonist, Chiron, shrinks himself because of the ever present threat of violence-a threat he eventually pays forward by brutally beating a classmate. The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased literalize the way that homophobia can rip people away from the traditional vision of teenagerdom-the backseat make outs, the backwoods keggers-and send them on drab reprogramming missions in which the kids end up policing and punishing themselves. The pulp danger in those films could be seen as almost a fever-dream inversion of the real-world peril facing LGBTQ people. all about the phenomenon of the “gay best friend.” Some female protagonists have flirted with queerness, but many of them merely as part of a larger exploration of delinquency see the deadly troublemakers of Peter Jackson’s 1994 feature, Heavenly Creatures, or of the 1998 thriller Wild Things. Think of Damian in Mean Girls or Blaine in Cruel Intentions: sassy sidekicks so hilarious, and also such clichés, that there was a 2013 comedy called G.B.F. And as supporting players, they’re allowed to be rowdy rather than just prettily pensive. Gay kids have long shown up in mainstream high-school comedy, just not as stars. Of course, that vision is wider than just the five recent films I wrote about. The rambunctious experience of puberty so familiar in film history-from Grease to Sixteen Candles to Lady Bird-has so far not been central to Hollywood’s vision of the queer coming of age. Ezquiel, a fifteen-year-old gay teenager in his sensual awakening. In content and style, these works vary widely, but they share a somewhat reserved, cautious tone as they portray kids coming to understand their homosexuality. Our Top 15 list of the best Gay Movies 2020 selected for the Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, I wrote about the proliferation of gay teens in recent, widely seen movies: the hit rom-com Love, Simon, the buzzy conversion-therapy dramas Boy Erased and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and the Best Picture nominee Call Me by Your Name and winner Moonlight. It’s happening in cinema, too-though the films hardly feel like celebrations of liberation. On TV, shows like Riverdale have been extending the work of Glee to make stories about, say, girls asking girls to homecoming into no big deal. Rising stars like Kiyoko, Troye Sivan, and Kim Petras have sung of flighty first love through an LGBTQ lens. On this past New Year’s Day, the musician Hayley Kiyoko christened the year to come as “20gayteen.” Her meaning: Queer kids were about to take over pop culture.