Set around a birthday party, it’s one of the first features to deal with gay life on its own terms, including copious boozing, relationship strains and lacerating recriminations.
Debate and controversy still surround the film - some subjects accused Livingston of underpaying them for their participation, for one - but it remains a vital and uncommonly empathetic work.Ĭast: Kenneth Nelson, Peter White, Leonard FreyĪ decade before he sparked outrage with Cruising, the thriller in which Al Pacino goes undercover in a gay leather bar to hunt down a serial killer, director William Friedkin presented this portrait of a group of New York friends on the cusp of liberation. At the time, simply allowing the gay community to tell their own stories, in their own words, was a radical act, and Livingston gave her subjects space to discuss the pleasure and pain of queer existence with unvarnished honesty. But it’s the conversations that truly make Paris Is Burning an LGBTQ landmark. The performances are wild, expressive and still a joy to behold, even after 14 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which owes the film a great debt for paving the way toward the mainstreaming of drag culture. The same year Madonna lifted the concept of ‘voguing’ out of New York’s queer underground and took it to the top of the charts, film student Jennie Livingston brought a camera into that same world and allowed its stars to dance, sashay and, most crucially, speak for themselves. ? The 100 best romantic films of all-timeĬast: André Christian, Dorian Corey, Paris Duprée Written by Cath Clarke, Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, Alim Kheraj, Guy Lodge, Ben Walters and Matthew Singer. To that end, we enlisted some LGBTQ+ cultural pioneers, as well as Time Out writers to assist in assembling a list of the greatest gay films ever made – and the results show that queer life is far from a monolith. But the strides of the last half-century or so deserve to be celebrated. Obviously, there are still many barriers left to breach, and much work to be done to achieve true equality in Hollywood.
In 2022, we’ll see Billy Eichner’s Bros, the first romantic comedy penned by an openly gay man for a major studio, while the great Billy Porter will make his directorial debut with a story about a trans high school student. So, too, have the opportunities for queer stories written by and for the queer communities. Over the last few decades or so, though, the scope of LGBTQ+ experiences depicted on film has expanded greatly. Inasmuch as gay lives and issues were ever allowed to be addressed on screen without devolving into gross stereotypes, for much of the past century, the perspective was limited to that of white, cisgendered men.