Last year marked the 125th anniversary of The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Produced for Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope viewer in 1894, the title won't be familiar to many. But it shows two men dancing to a tune played by a violinist and has been claimed as the first gay film in screen history. In the second of a two-part survey, Cinema Paradiso looks back at what happened next.
In an ideal world, there would be a rich history of LGBTQ+ film-making. But societal prejudice across the globe, as well as state and cinematic censorship prevented the telling of stories about gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender characters until fairly recently. Indeed, with homosexual acts between consenting adults being illegal in most countries for much of the 20th century, non-hetero references to had to be coded to get past the moral guardians who insisted that impressionable minds had to be protected from images that might corrupt or pervert them. Consequently, same-sex attraction has been a screen taboo on all five continents for much of the last 125 years.
Stiff Upper Brits
Few films paint a more vivid picture of the everyday reality of being gay in a country that outlawed active homosexuality than Jack Gold's The Naked Civil Servant (1975), a memoir of self-proclaimed 'stately homo' Quentin Crisp that earned John Hurt a BAFTA for his mesmerising performance. He would reprise the role in Richard Laxton's An Englishman in New York (2009), while Crisp himself would go on to play Elizabeth I in Sally Potter's gender-bending adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1992). Another insightful biopic is Stephen Frears's Prick Up Your Ears (1987), which was based on John Lahr's account of the relationship between cocky Leicester playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his insecure lover, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina). Focusing on the friendship between Beatle John Lennon (Ian Hart) and manager Brian Epstein (David Angus), Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times (1992) similarly examines the clandestine nature of gay love in the Swinging Sixties and the theme recurs in Nick Moran's Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008) and Bill Jones and Jeff Simpson's hilarious, but acute animation, A Liar's Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman (2012).
With its exploration of sexuality and race, Kenneth Macpherson's experimental silent, Borderline (1930), is usually considered the first meaningful British film to examine same-sex attraction. Influenced by Sergei Eisenstein's montage and GW Pabst's psychological realism, this stylistically and thematically bold exercise remained in glorious isolation until producer Michael Balcon remade Reinhold Schünzel's Viktor un Viktoria (1933) as Victor Saville's First a Girl (1935), which teamed married stars Jessie Matthews and Sonnie Hale in a cross-dressing comedy that Blake Edwards would revisit for Julie Andrews and the Oscar-nominated Robert Preston in Victor Victoria (1982).
As in Hollywood, film-makers relied on coded inflections in pictures like Jack Lee's Once a Jolly Swagman, Lawrence Huntington's Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (both 1948) and Roy Boulting's High Treason (1951). The first mentioned not only starred closeted matinee idol Dirk Bogarde, but also Michael Ward, who was the best-known British 'sissy' actor, who became a familiar face and voice in four Norman Wisdom comedies, five Boulting brothers outings and six Carry Ons, alongside such other camp icons as Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams, who were played by David Charles and Michael Sheen in Andy De Emmony's TV biopic, Fantabulosa! (2006). Two more BBC dramas (which are available on Legends of Comedy) examined the secret lives of beloved comedy stars, with David Walliams taking the lead in John Alexander's Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me and Phil Davis playing Wilfrid Brambell opposite Jason Isaacs as Steptoe and Son (1962-74) co-star Harry H. Corbett in Michael Samuels's The Curse of Steptoe (both 2008).
Although director Anthony Asquith and writer Terence Rattigan were both gay, they were forced to include coded references in such collaborations as The Winslow Boy (1948), The Browning Version (1951) and The Final Test (1953), although the latter was slightly more overt in its contrasts between rhyming couplets and cricket. Robert Morley played the poet-hero worshipped by batsman Jack Warner's son, Andrew Ray, and he would take the title role in Gregory Ratoff's Oscar Wilde (1960) a few years after Asquith had scored a triumph with his adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). Despite looking nothing like the Irish playwright, Peter Finch was a more persuasive lead in Ken Hughes's The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), although his efforts have since been surpassed by Stephen Fry in Brian Gilbert's Wilde (1997) and Rupert Everett in the self-directed The Happy Prince (2018).
'Because I Wanted Him'
Nicknamed 'the Idol of the Odeons', the aforementioned Dirk Bogarde did much to spark the debate on the decriminalisation of homosexuality with his hugely courageous, BAFTA-nominated performance as a lawyer being blackmailed by ex-lover Peter McEnery in Basil Dearden's Victim (1961), which became the first film in the English language to use the word 'homosexual'. Bogarde would contribute equally strong turns to Roy Ward Baker's The Singer Not the Song (1961), Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), John Schlesinger's Darling (1965) and Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Death in Venice (1971), although he never publicly acknowledged his sexuality. Murray Melvin also took a risk in reprising his stage role in Shelagh Delaney's epochal play, A Taste of Honey, to play pregnant teenager Rita Tushingham's gay friend in Tony Richardson's masterly 1961 social realist saga.
Tushingham also headlined Sidney J. Furie's The Leather Boys (1964), in which she plays a newlywed who discovers that husband Colin Campbell would rather be with the best mate, Dudley Sutton. The male bonding had been less blatant between Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) but reflected what many have identified as TE Lawrence's asexuality or repressed homosexuality. Indeed, the notion of men being trapped in their symbolic class circumstances was a recurring one at the start of the decade, with a number of so-called 'kitchen sink' pictures by the bisexual Tony Richardson (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1962) and the openly gay Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, 1963 & If…, 1968) riffing on the theme.
Two years after the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, Canadian Ted Kotcheff added a racial dimension to the relationship between Robin Phillips and Hal Frederick in Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), which was released the same year that Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestled naked in Ken Russell's take on DH Lawrence's Women in Love and Rex Harrison and Richard Burton played gay hairdressers in Stanley Donen's Staircase, a painfully misjudged offering that has been rather generously compared to Vicious (2013-15), the ITV sitcom in which Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi play a bickering couple who have shared a London flat for almost half a century.
Burton would play another gay character in Michael Tuchner's Villain (1971), which emerged the year after James Fox had excelled as a gangster seeking refuge in the home of rock star Mick Jagger in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance (1970). Indeed, this was a banner year for gay British cinema, as a pair of Joe Orton adaptations, Silvio Narizzano's Loot and Douglas Hickox's Entertaining Mr Sloane, were released alongside Ken Russell's The Music Lovers (1970), in which Richard Chamberlain played the homosexual Russian composer, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Glenda Jackson co-starred as wronged wife Antonina Miliukova, and she played a similar role in John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), as spouse Peter Finch finds passion in the arms of Murray Head. By contrast, academic Alan Bates finds himself drifting apart from Richard O'Callaghan in Harold Pinter's version of Simon Gray's acclaimed play, Butley, while Worcestershire sixth-former Spencer Banks comes to terms with his heritage and his sexual self in Alan Clarke's take on David Rudkin's Penda's Fen (both 1974). More contentiously, Brad Davis and Norbert Weisser kiss in the showers after bonding in a Turkish prison in Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978), which divided audiences over the way in which the 'gay' content was presented.
Rattling Cages
Having made a splash as the production designer on Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), Derek Jarman emerged as the most significant gay British film-maker in the middle of the decade with Sebastiane (1976), a homoerotic life of the Roman saint that had the distinction of being the first feature with dialogue in Latin. Bringing a punky aesthetic to films like Jubilee (1977), Jarman revisited Shakespeare in The Tempest (1979) and The Angelic Conversation (1985) before alternating between radical political polemics like The Last of England (1988), War Requiem (1989) and The Garden (1990) with such biopics as Caravaggio (1986), Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993). Moreover, having been diagnosed as HIV+, Jarman explored his experience and his emotions in the most personal and avant-garde of all his works, Blue (1993), while his influence could plainly be felt on John Maybury's Francis Bacon biopic, Love Is the Devil (1998).
Two more British film-makers succumbed to AIDS, Nigel Finch (The Lost Language of Cranes, 1991) and Tony Richardson, whose adaptation of John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) starred Rob Lowe and a still un-out Jodie Foster. Jarman's life and career were celebrated by muse Tilda Swinton in the 2008 documentary, Derek, which was directed by Isaac Julien, whose career had begun with the equally important biodoc, Looking For Langston (1989) in which he profiles gay Harlem Renaissance writer, Langston Hughes. Julien would also consider the impact of Frantz Fanon's writings on colonialism in Black Skin, White Mask (1996) and trace the history of Blaxploitation in Baad Asssss Cinema (2002).
However, Julien also explored what it was like to be black and gay in London at the time of Elizabeth II's 1977 Silver Jubilee in Young Soul Rebels (1991). This period also provided the setting for Ron Peck's Nighthawks (1978), which followed geography teacher Ken Robertson's excursions to the capital's gay bars and discos. Having produced shorts like What Can I Do With a Male Nude? (1985), Peck recalled his experience of working on the film with writer Paul Hallam in Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks II (1991), which contrasts starkly with the politically charged gangster saga, Empire State (1987), in which American businessman Martin Landau embarks upon a torrid affair with rent boy Lee Drysdale.
There was nothing quite so graphic in some of the decade's other gay-themed offerings, as student fashion choices the length of Britain were influenced by Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in Charles Sturridge's exquisite adaption of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1981) and no one quite knew where to look at some of the mincing antics in uniform witnessed in the BBC sitcoms It Ain't Half Hot Mum (1974-81) and 'Allo 'Allo! (1982-92), as well as in the South East Asian duo of Michael Blakemore's Privates on Parade and Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (both 1983).
Infinitely superior was the Terence Davies Trilogy of Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), in which the Liverpudlian director reflected on the impact that Catholicism and domestic dysfunction can have on a youth coming to terms with their sexuality. He touched upon similar themes in the 2008 documentary, Of Time and the City, and has frequently employed memory and the family unit to explore the shaping of personality in autobiographical outings like Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) and such period pieces as The House of Mirth (2000), Sunset Song (2015) and A Quiet Passion (2016), which echo and contrast with the heritage approach taken by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant in such EM Forster adaptations as the semi-autobiographical, Maurice (1987).
The latter was co-produced by Film Four, whose influence over British film-making in this period is incalculable. Among its biggest hits was Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which was scripted by Hanif Kureishi and starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in a Thatcherite parable that examined a range of prejudices that would intensify as this troubled decade progressed. However, the UK film industry was slow to respond to the AIDS crisis, although it did make an important contribution in late 1986 with the Iceberg and Monolith adverts that were devised by Sammy Harari, directed by Nicolas Roeg and voiced by John Hurt. Channel Four also did its bit with the 'In the Pink' season of films that included one of the first features to explore the HIV crisis, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.'s Buddies (1985), while ITV sponsored Waris Hussein's four-part drama, Intimate Contact (1987), which focused on middle-class housewife Claire Bloom's response to discovering that philandering husband Daniel Massey has contracted the virus.
Despite the government's 'Don't Die of Ignorance' message, fear of AIDS led to an increase in homophobia that found expression in the prejudice meted out to transvestite Adrian Pasdar in Christopher Monger's Just Like a Woman (1992). However, something of a charm offensive was launched by crossover items like Hettie Macdonald's Beautiful Thing (1996) and Richard Kwietniowski's take on Gilbert Adair's charming tome, Love and Death on Long Island (1997). The former was set on a South London housing estate and used the music of Mama Cass to accompany the burgeoning relationship between teenager Glen Berry and his father-abused classmate Scott Neal, while the latter featured a standout performance by John Hurt, as a buttoned-up novelist who heads to the local movie theatre while mulling over a suggestion to adapt one of his books for the screen and promptly becomes fixated with Jason Priestley, the Hollywood heartthrob star of Hotpants College II.
Following suit were Nancy Meckler's Alive & Kicking (1996), in which dancer Jason Flemyng seeks solace after the AIDS death of lover Anthony Higgins with therapist Antony Sher, as well as Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter's Boyfriends (1997), Lawless Heart (2001) and Sparkle (2007), and Paul Oremland's Like It Is (1998) and Surveillance (2007). But the principal game (and mind) changer was Queer As Folk (1999-2000), a Channel Four series from Doctor Who scribe Russell T. Davies that was set in the Canal Street district of Manchester and followed the impact on Aidan Gillen's friendship with Craig Kelly of a reckless newcomer, Charlie Hunnam. In more recent times, Andrew Haigh's Greek Pete (2009) and Weekend (2011) had a similar effect, as society at large came to accept civil partnerships and gay marriage. Indeed, while gay characters could still teeter on the verge of caricature in the likes of Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty (2004), and Julian Jarrold's Kinky Boots (2005) and Brideshead Revisited (2008), they were better integrated into popular dramas like Roger Michell's Enduring Love (2004) and John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).
Cinema still had an activist role to play, however, with 2014 notably reflecting upon the alliance between gay rights activists and the striking Welsh miners in Matthew Warchus's Pride (2014) and the demonisation of homosexuals in pre-1967 Britain in Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game (2014), which earned Benedict Cumberbatch an Oscar nomination for his performance as Enigma code-cracker Alan Turing a year before Eddie Redmayne was also cited for Best Actor for his work in Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl (2015), in which he plays artist Einar Wegener, who became one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery in transitioning to become Lili Elbe.
Since playing the young Turing, Alex Lawther has performed so strongly as gay characters in Andrew Steggall's Departure (2015), Trudie Styler's Freak Show (2017) and Toby MacDonald's Old Boys (2018) that he has earned comparisons to Ben Whishaw, who has excelled as the grieving man reaching out to his late lover's disapproving Cambodian-Chinese mother, Cheng Pei Pei, in Hong Khaou's Lilting (2014) and as Norman Scott opposite Hugh Grant's Jeremy Thorpe in Stephen Frears's BBC serial, A Very English Scandal (2018), which was scripted by John Preston and the ever-influential, Russell T. Davies.
Among the other recent British films available from Cinema Paradiso are Richard Bracewell's The Gigolos (2007), Jacqui and David Morris's Mr Right, Gerard Johnson's Tony, Christian Martin's Shank (all 2009) and its sequel, Cal (2013), David Hoyle's Uncle David, Carl Medland's The Cost of Love, Rikki Beadle Blair's Fit (all 2010), Sally El Hosaini's My Brother the Devil, Tom Shkolnik's The Comedian (both 2012), Philippe Audi-Dor's Wasp (2014), Peter Greenaway's Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) and Steve McLean's Postcards From London (2018).
Two films deserve special mention, however. Set in Yorkshire, Francis Lee's God's Own Country follows the romance between sheep farmer Josh O'Connor and Romanian migrant worker, Alec Secareanu, and Luca Guadagnino's adaptation of André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name (both 2017), which takes place in in 1980s Italy and charts teenager Timothée Chalamet's crush on his archaeologist father's assistant, Armie Hammer. Moreover, the latter also saw 89 year-old James Ivory become the oldest winner of an Academy Award for his screenplay.
Continental Sophistication
Although social convention kept LGBTQ+ themes off screens across the world for much of the 20th century, French pioneer Georges Méliès made teasing allusions in The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon (1907). We have already seen in the first part of Cinema Paradiso's history of gay cinema how the silent avant-garde sought to discuss proscribed topics and Jean-Pierre Melville took up Jean Cocteau's cause in his version of Les Enfants Terribles (1950). But overt offerings like Denys de la Patillière's The Ostrich Has Two Eggs (1957) and Jean Delannoy's Les Amitiés particulières (1964) were rare, with the result that implication had to be employed by René Clément in his Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Purple Noon (1960), and the bisexual Jacques Demy in his consciously camp coded musical, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), which teamed Gene Kelly with sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac.
Among the handful of gay-themed films to achieve cross-over success at the box-office was Édouard Molinaro's drag comedy, La Cage aux Folles (1978), and its 1980 sequel, La Cage aux Folles II, which featured Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi inspiring the roles taken by Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in Mike Nichols's remake, The Birdcage (1996). Bertrand Blier and Francis Veber took a similarly farcical approach in respectively casting Gérard Depardieu as a bisexual crook in Tenue de soirée (1986) and by having Daniel Auteuil pretend to be gay in The Closet (2001).
But several French film-makers specialised in gay dramas and Cinema Paradiso offers users the chance to savour such significant pictures as Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998), Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel's Ma Vie (2002) and Gaël Morel's Our Paradise (2011) among many others. Also, among the other French gay and transgender titles available to rent are Claire Denis's Beau Travail (1999), Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget (2009) and Camille Vidal-Naquet's Sauvage (2018).
Getting Confrontational
Either side of reunification, German film-makers have continued to champion LGBTQ+ issues. Names like Ulrike Ottinger, Rosa von Praunheim and Monika Treut are not as familiar as they should be, but the prolific and tragically short-lived Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains an iconic figure in gay cinema, as he tackled notions of sexuality, race and class with an abrasive style that makes items like Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), the epic TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Querelle (1982) as compelling now as when they were first released in markedly less tolerant times.
While Fassbinder was one of the driving forces behind New German Cinema and mainstream notables like Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1989) and Percy Adlon (Salmonberries, 1991) were given licence to examine topics like transvestism, the likes of Frank Ripploh operated on the indie margins. However, his autobiographical comedy of sexual manners, Taxi Zum Klo (1980), which centres on a teacher's efforts to keep his cruising activities under wraps, has exerted a considerable influence on subsequent generations of gay directors, who have benefited from the rise of specialist festivals and home entertainment labels.
Among the features on offer from Cinema Paradiso are Kutlug Ataman's Lola and Bilidikid (1999), Dennis Gansel's We Are the Night (2010) and Piotr J. Lewandowski's Jonathan (2016). Also worth catching are Hungarian maestro István Szabó's account of a Hapsburg military scandal, Colonel Redl (1985), and Austrian Klaus Händl's Tomcat (2016), in which an idyllic Viennese romance starts to crumble after a shocking act of impetuous violence.
In Italy, numerous giallo thrillers included LGBTQ+ characters, although the majority were villainous or met unsavoury ends. Sadly, this was also true in real life of ground-breaking director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who explored gay themes in pictures like Love Meetings (1964), Theorem (1968) and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and whose final days were chronicled by Abel Ferrara in Pasolini (2014), which stars Willem Dafoe. Contemporaries Federico Fellini (Satyricon, 1969) and Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, 1970) also touched upon same-sex attraction, while several commedia all'italiano outings by the likes of Dino Risi also featured camp characters.
Among the recent Italian pictures available to rent are Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love (2009), Marco Filibert's David's Birthday (2010) and Ivan Cotroneo's One Kiss (2016). However, the director most associated with homosexual scenarios is the Turkish-born Ferzan Özpetek, who has developed into a master storyteller with such handsome dramas as The Ignorant Fairies (2001), Facing Window (2003), A Perfect Day (2008) and Loose Cannons (2010).
As in Italy, the influence of the Catholic Church has shaped Spanish cinema's attitude to LGBTQ+ subjects. However, the fact that the country was also under the fascist rule of dictator Francisco Franco until 1975 also meant that directors like Eloy de la Iglesia - whose Murder in a Blue World (1973) has been called 'the Spanish Clockwork Orange' - had to make covert references to homosexuality. This all changed as the pasota ('couldn't care less') generation began making movies after the restoration of democracy and its leading spokesman was Pedro Almodóvar, who followed such consciously outrageous early outings as Pepi Luci Bom (1980), Labyrinth of Passion (1982) and Law of Desire (1987) with more considered explorations of gay issues in such acclaimed features as All About My Mother (1999), Broken Embraces (2009) and The Skin I Live In (2011). There are many more examples from all over the world so browse other titles in the genre or filter them by country of origin.
The Queer Commonwealth
Moving further afield, Canadian Ted Kotcheff challenged macho Australian attitudes by showing Donald Pleasence come on to Gary Bond in the Ozploitation classic, Wake in Fright (1971). But another two decades were to pass before Russell Crowe shocked father Jack Thompson by coming out in Geoff Burton's The Sum of Us (1991) and Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce stood on rocks in their frocks in Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Yet, despite the international success of these features, it's only comparatively recently that LGBTQ+ features began appearing with any regularity, thanks to the likes of Dean Murphy's Strange Bedfellows (2004), Justin Kurzel's Snowtown (2011) and Sophie Hyde's 52 Tuesdays (2013).
By contrast, New Zealand can only point to rare outings like Stewart Main's 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (2005), while only a few of notable gay movies have made it out of South Africa, Oliver Schmitz's Life, Above All (2010), Oliver Hermanus's Beauty (2011) and Colin Trengove's The Wound (2017). However, Canadian cinema has developed a proud record of tackling gay issues since the release of John Greyson's Zero Patience (1993) and Lilies (1996), and Thom Fitzgerald's Beefcake (1998). Indeed, three of the country's best-known film-makers have returned to gay themes at various intervals in their careers - David Cronenberg, among others, in Shivers (1975) and Crash (1996); Denys Arcand in The Decline of the American Empire (1986) and Love and Human Remains (1994); and Atom Egoyan in The Adjuster (1991) and Where the Truth Lies (2005).
Moreover, Quebec can boast the enfant terrible of LGBTQ+ cinema in Xavier Dolan, who shot to fame with his debut feature, I Killed My Mother (2009), and has since displayed a Fassbinderian talent to shock with Heartbeats (2010), Tom At the Farm (2013) and It's Only the End of the World (2015). However, he still has a way to go to beat Canada's provocateur in chief, Bruce LaBruce, who may have mellowed since making a splash with pictures like No Skin Off My Ass (1991) and Skin Flick (1999), but who can still amuse and outrage in equal measures with such distinctive offerings as Otto: or Up With the Dead People (2008) and The Misandrists (2017).
John Palmer's Sugar (2004) was based on LaBruce's short stories and is also available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, along with Émile Gaudreault's Mambo Italiano (2003), Richard Bell's Eighteen (2004), Rod Oliver's Third Man Out (2005), Laurie Lynd's Breakfast With Scot (2007), Rodrigue Jean's Love in the Time of Civil War (2014), Stephen Dunn's Closet Monster (2015) and Drew Lint's M/M (2018).
Socio-religious pressures have hampered the bid to build on Bollywood's first gay picture, Mahesh Dattani's Mango Soufflé (2002). However, it says something that films like Onir's My Brother: Nikhil (2005), Tarun Mansukhani's Dostana (2008) and Hansal Mehta's Aligarh (2015) have been made at all. It's also somewhat remarkable that Haim Tabakman's Eyes Wide Open (2009) and Ofir Raul Graizer's The Cakemaker (2017) have been produced alongside features by Israel's leading screen commentator on gay matters, Eytan Fox: Yossi & Jagger (2002) and The Bubble (2006).
Pushing Boundaries
Elsewhere in Asia, Thailand and Taiwan have yet to produce many LGBTQ+ features. But the former has made an impressive start with Ekachai Uekrongtham's Beautiful Boxer (2003) and Poj Amon's Bangkok Love Story (2007), while the latter can lay claim to such gay classics as Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), Tsai Ming-liang's The River (1997) and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006), and Leste Chen's Eternal Summer (2006).
The same is true of Mainland China, as Chen Kaige's Palme d'Or-winning Farewell My Concubine (1993) has since been joined by Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace (1996), Kit Hung's Soundless Wind Chime (2009) and Simon Chang's Speechless (2012). However, Hong Kong has a much richer tradition of gay and lesbian pictures, with the pick being Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together (1997), which follows Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung to Argentina, as they strive to patch up their foundering romance. Clearly having picked up a trick or two from the master, Wong's regular cinematographer, Australian Christopher Doyle, made his own directorial bow in 1998 with another gay story, Away With Words.
Despite Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) becoming a cult treasure for its avant-grindhouse depiction of transgression in the Tokyo margins, Japanese gay cinema hasn't travelled particularly well. However, there is much to admire in Nagisha Oshima's Gohatto (1999), Satoshi Kon's anime, Tokyo Godfathers (2003), and Sion Sono's Love Exposure (2008). Near neighbour, South Korea exports even less gay cinema, with only Leesong Hee-il's No Regret (2006) being currently available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.
The clash between machismo and homosexuality has informed much LGBTQ+ cinema in Latin America. Once again, societal repression imposed by the Catholic Church and right-wing regimes has played its part in restricting the production of gay-themed films. However, following Alejandro Jodorowsky's typically esoteric duo of The Holy Mountain (1973), Mexican directors have slowly been rising to the task, with Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Sergio Tovar Velarde's Mexican Men (2015), and Julio Hernández Cordón's I Promise You Anarchy (2015) among the most significant titles. However, the country's most prominent gay film-maker is Julián Hernández, who has twice won the coveted Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival, one of them them being for Raging Sun, Raging Sky (2009), as well as producing such other popular pictures as Jayson Bend: Queen and Country (2013) and I Am Happiness on Earth (2014).
Brazilian Hector Babenco has also won his share of awards for outings like Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), which earned William Hurt the Oscar for Best Actor, and Carandiru (2003). Among the other Brazilian features available from Cinema Paradiso are Aluisio Abranches's From Beginning to End (2009), Alexandre Carvalho's Boys in Brazil (2014), Papu Curotto's Esteros (2016) and Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher's Hard Paint (2018). Neighbouring Venezuela has also started to develop a tradition for gay pictures, with Mariana Rondón's amusingly affectionate rite of passage, Bad Hair (2013), being followed by Lorenzo Vigas's From Afar (2015), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Despite the political restrictions in Fidel Castro's Cuba, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío still managed to produce the Oscar-nominated gem, Strawberry and Chocolate (1994), an unexpected love story involving a student and an artist that examines homophobia in Havana in the late 1970s. Oppressive regimes also prevented gay themes from being broached in Argentinian cinema. However, the spread of more liberal attitudes resulted in the production of such pictures as Anahí Berneri's A Year Without Love (2005), Santiago Otheguy's La Léon (2006), Lucía Puenzo's XXY (2007) and Luca Santa Anna's Bromance (2016). But the country's highest-profile gay film-maker is Marco Berger, who continues to excel with such entertaining and insightful offerings as Plan B (2009), Sexual Tension Volatile (2012) and Taekwondo (2016).
