To be considered for the list, a movie had to prominently feature gay, lesbian, trans, or queer characters concern itself centrally with LGBTQ+ themes present its LGBTQ+ characters in a fair and realistic light and/or be seen as a touchpoint in the evolution of queer cinema. When revising this list in further recent updates, we’ve also looked to include more stories from outside of the U.S., and we’re excited for people to discover films like Taboo (Gohatto), a gay love story set during the waning years of the samurai era The Wound (Inxeba), centered around three men during a tribal initiation ceremony in Africa and Australian film 52 Tuesdays, about the relationship between a daughter and her mother who is undergoing a gender transition.
In our latest thorough update to the list, we added titles like the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, about LGBTQ+ activists risking their lives for the cause in Russia Certified Fresh comedy Shiva, Baby and Netflix’s The Old Guard, a rare movie about super beings that showed a same-sex relationship between two of its heroes. There are broad American comedies ( The Birdcage), artful Korean crime dramas ( The Handmaiden), groundbreaking indies ( Tangerine), and landmark documentaries ( Paris Is Burning). Our list of the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time stretches back 90 years to the pioneering German film, Mädchen in Uniform, which was subsequently banned by the Nazis, and crosses multiple continents, cultures, and genres.
In 2020, Pedro Almadóvar’s Pain and Glory would make a dent on the awards circuit, as would Celine Sciamma’s romance Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, one of the best-reviewed movies of recent years. Meanwhile, Love, Simon made history in 2018 as the first mainstream, wide-release teenage rom-com to focus on a gay character (a spin-off TV series, Love, Victor, enters its second season on Hulu this year). At the 2019 Oscars, Olivia Colman was named Best Actress for playing the lesbian queen Anne in The Favourite, beating out Can You Ever Forgive Me?‘s Melissa McCarthy, who played lesbian writer Lee Israel. In 2016, Carol earned six Oscar nominations, and just a year later, for the first time in history, Moonlight became the first LGBTQ+-themed movie to win Best Picture. In the meantime, I'm going to clear my Netflix queue before my next GNI (gays' night in).It’s been a big few years for LGBTQ films. So if you have strong feelings about anything below, I'm all ears.
Full disclosure: As a gay man, I have absolutely zero authority over whether the female stimulation depicted is accurate-or fun.
Here, I've rounded up TV shows and films with the best sex scenes on Netflix featuring LGBTQ couples.
But there's something really erotic about watching a sexual relationship blossom after a romantic (often dramatic) series of events that don't begin with a boring porn opener like, "Hey, I'm Tyler-want to f*ck?" Don't get it twisted: Porn is great when I want to see straight-up nudity and pretend that I don't need buckets of lube to make anal sex pleasurable. It's gotten to that point where these days, sex scenes on Netflix can be more of a turn-on for me than actual porn. My hope is that these graphic, raw sex scenes will help those still exploring their identities to understand their sexualities are completely normal, no matter who they prefer. Thankfully, as cinematography has evolved, so has mainstream media's portrayal of intimacy across the spectrum of sexuality. (They were all PG-13-maybe the R-rated ones were a little more gratuitous, but I was too nervous to search for them on my family computer.) As a gay teenager still in the closet, these muted portrayals of queer sexuality only furthered the idea that my identity was something I needed to hide.
When I was younger, most LGBTQ sex scenes I saw didn't show much beyond two people passionately making out, a little hand-over-the-crotch action, and tight shots of faces moaning.