In Marais’s triple role-as the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be-the actor lends virtuosic and symbolic appeal to Cocteau’s cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator.
Much of Beauty and the Beast’s deep magic comes from Jean Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast in love. Clayton Dillardīeauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
Decades of close readings, whether along psychological or self-reflexive lines, have been unable to diminish or demystify the film’s effervescent sensuality. But this surrealist masterpiece isn’t merely about flesh rather, the body becomes an entry point to memory and art, with hands and mouths giving way to images that defy the mind. Enrique Rivero’s shirtless torso remains the most enduring emblem of Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde classic The Blood of a Poet. Derek Smithįrom clutching his bare chest after witnessing his palm sprout a pair of lips to peering through keyholes while drifting through a gravity-free hallway. This tender portrait of unrequited love both excoriates the regressive ideals of a school’s and, by proxy, a nation’s power structures, advocating for compassion, tolerance, and the normalization of all desire. The girl’s affection for her sympathetic teacher, Fraulein von Bernberg (Dorothea Wieck), is expressed and reciprocated through furtive glances and sensual gestures that hint at an underlying and forbidden passion that can never be fully manifested. Sagan sensitively regards the female camaraderie within the confines of a strict German all-girls school, as well as the burgeoning lustfulness of the teenage Manuela (Hertha Thiele). Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform sees youthful desire as fluid, disorienting, and rebellious. Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931) If stripped of the notion that the artist Zoret’s (Benjamin Christensen) attraction toward his titular muse (Walter Slezak), whose alleged bisexuality is clearly of a solely opportunistic strain, is physical as well as social, the film essentially becomes an embittered (and fairly rote, despite the astonishingly suffocating mise-en-scène) tale of two cuckolds. Many have chosen to downplay Michael’s gay subtext, but to do so would deny the power of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s fastidious attention to the polarity of love’s vicissitudes. Matt BrennanĮditor’s Note: An earlier version of this list can be found on our Patreon. These films are essential because we are essential: The work of ensuring that we aren’t erased or forgotten continues apace, and the struggle stretches into a horizon that no screen, no matter its size, can quite capture. There’s rage here, and also love isolation, and communal spirit fear, and the forthright resistance to it.
The cinema isn’t the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can, if the films listed below are any indication, be among the most powerful, projecting the complexities of the LGBTQ experience onto the culture’s largest, brightest mirror. “My name is Harvey Milk,” the San Francisco supervisor, memorialized in Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk, proclaimed in 1978, less than one year before his assassination.
From Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael to Todd Haynes’s Carol, naming and seeing emerge, intertwined, as radical acts-acts of becoming (Sally Potter’s Orlando) and acts of being (Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason), acts of speech (Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied) and acts of show (Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning) that together reaffirm the revolutionary potential of the seventh art. The titles on our list of the best LGBTQ movies of all time are a globe-spanning, multigenerational testament to our existence in a world where our erasure is no abstraction. “These,” as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell urged his viewers, “are the names to remember.” A gunman, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the wee hours of that awful Sunday, massacring LGBTQ people of color and their allies in the middle of Pride Month, and the commemoration of the dead demanded knowing who they were. The mother of a child gunned down at Sandy Hook penned it in an open letter. Five years ago this month, in the aftermath of the attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, one call to action rose above the din: “Say their names.” New Yorkers chanted it steps from the Stonewall Inn.