Top LGBT films to date...

[Chris James]

...and I am sure there will be more. So many films come from the written page and there have been some wonderful books on the LGBT subject in the past decade, some of them will become films.

But just because the subject matter is specific to the LGBT community doesn't mean that these films will be outside the mainstream. Just look at the following list published by the editors of Advocate. How many of them have you seen in the past twenty years? I don't disagree with their ranking because their top ten also includes my list of favorites:

http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/film/2014/06/23/top-175-essential-films-all-time-lgbt-viewers

Films like Brokeback Mountain and Philadelphia are gut wrenching and guarantee to make you cry. I waited for the DVD to come out so I didn't make a fool of myself in the theater, but then even straight people cried while watching these films. And they laughed at the silliness of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Boys in the Band.

We can see the tragedy in a film about AIDS(Philadelphia) or gender confusion(Boys Don't Cry), but we can also laugh at ourselves as we should. Good comedy is very hard to do, any comedian will tell you that. So when we get a Priscilla or Boys or even La Cage I think we should laugh our heads off because the tragedy in the headlines is sobering enough and we cannot live our lives under a cloud.

[Graeme]

I'm glad (though a little surprised) to see the Australian movie "The Sum of Us" on the list near the end, but I didn't see Head On or The Object of My Affection.

Head On is an Australian movie about a young Greek man struggling with being gay. It's a movie I wanted to see when it was in the cinema, but I was still deeply in the closet at the time and couldn't bring myself to go. It apparently has a very graphic masturbation scene involving the lead actor, a very dreamy looking Alex Dimitriades... (he's a lot older now, but still very good looking)

The Object of My Affection is a romantic comedy about a woman who falls in love with a gay guy. This one I've seen, and I can still remember the scene where Jennifer Aniston's love interest tells her that he wants to be with the guy he's been seeing and not her....

[The Pecman]

Just saw the recent HBO movie The Normal Heart, which I thought was also gut-wrenching and generally well done. My big problem with it is that it feels like the first 2 acts of a 3-act play... there's no real ending there. The real story about the real-life Larry Kramer is much more interesting, particularly in what happened when he quit the Gay Men's Health Crisis group in NYC and statrted ACT-UP to try to force the city of NY to provide more healthcare for AIDS patients.

Here's the trailer:

I think it's an extremely well-acted film, but not that satisfying as a complete story. For those of us who remember those early days of the 1980s, it's a flashback to another time that was very different from where we are now. Had I knew then what I know now, I would've been much, much angrier and far more active against Reagan, the very-closeted Mayor Koch, and everybody else who wasn't lifting a finger to investigate the causes and treatment of HIV and AIDS. My partner and I hooked up in 1982, and I was such a workaholic that I completely ignored politics for most of that decade... though I disliked Reagan quite a bit. Now, I know enough to actually hate him for all that he didn't do.