Several factors may have weighed into this outcome.
We double-checked the numbers, it got beat out by three votes. Then we announced the top 10 on our Facebook page in alphabetical order and let you vote one last time to decide the top 10 order.Īnd surprise, Brokeback Mountain was not the number one movie. So, after voting closed we sorted through the nearly 35,000 nominations (representing over 600 individual film titles) to identify your top 100 favorite gay films. And we wanted to break out gay documentaries onto their own list (You’ll find the Top 25 Greatest Gay Documentaries results here.) We figured there were finally enough quality gay films to justify the expansion. We also wanted to expand our list to 100 from the top 50 we had done previously. We wanted to see how your list of favorites had changed. We conducted a similar poll several years ago, but a lot has happened culturally since then, and a number of worthy movies of gay interest have been released. A few weeks ago we asked readers to submit up to ten of their favorite films by write-in vote. Frankly, one that surprised the hell out of us here.īut before we get to that, an introduction. This list of the Top 100 Greatest Gay Movies is probably going to generate some howls of protest thanks to a rather major upset in the rankings. There’s a major upset in the rankings!īrace yourselves. Extraordinary, not expected.Our readers name their favorite gay films.
In all of the above, however, opposite skin colors were a focal point. On TV, couples like these appeared in the occasional storylines on shows, like Tom and Helen in The Jeffersons, and later soap operas and '90s hits like Ally McBeal, The West Wing, and ER. More arrived in the early aughts, like 2001’s Save The Last Dance, the 2005 Dinner remake Guess Who, with Ashton Kutcher as the white significant other to Zoe Saldana, 2006’s Something New about a Black woman (Sanaa Lathan) dating a white man (Simon Baker), and Lance Gross and America Ferrera were a secretly engaged duo in Our Family Wedding in 2010. And when they did happen, the colors of their skin were central story lines: There was 1975’s Mandingo, Hairspray in 1988, Spike Lee’s controversial Jungle Fever in 1991, and Whitney Houston opposite Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard (1992). In the decades since, however, there have been surprisingly few films featuring main characters in cross-cultural relationships. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. This spring's Everything Everything starred Amandla Stenberg opposite Nick Robinson, and audiences were pleasantly surprised when the Beauty And The Beast live-action remake revealed that the human forms of each inanimate couple was mixed-race. Fagbenle) in The Handmaid's Tale, Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) in Jessica Jones, and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) on The Walking Dead. There's also Offred (Elisabeth Moss) and Luke (O. Jessica Williams’ title character in The Incredible Jessica James dates men of different races, including one portrayed by Chris O'Dowd, and Peter (Tom Holland) had his eyes on the bi-racial Liz (Laura Harrier) in this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. There's Ingrid Goes West's Ingrid and Dan in the upcoming indie film Patti Cake$, Patti’s (Danielle Macdonald) love interest just so happens to be a Black death metal fan (played by Mamoudou Athie).
In the past year, more movies and TV shows have been featuring interracial couples without focusing on their race - or even acknowledging their skin color at all. While that fact feels notable, perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising.