The Films Every Gay Man Should See: A BoysDo Guide to Queer Cinema

The Films

Victim (1961) Dirk Bogarde plays a married barrister being blackmailed over a relationship with a young man. He didn't have to make this film. He did anyway. The first mainstream British film to use the word "homosexual" and argue, plainly, that the law was wrong.

→ [Full review: Victim](/articles/victim)

Midnight Cowboy (1969) Joe Buck comes to New York to sell himself to rich women. What he finds, instead, is Ratso Rizzo — and the most tender, most devastating male love story Hollywood has ever produced, in a film that still doesn't quite understand what it made.

→ [Full review: Midnight Cowboy](/articles/midnight-cowboy)

Querelle (1982) Fassbinder's final film, made while he was dying, adapted from Genet. A sailor. A port. Murder and desire indistinguishable from each other. The most aggressively artificial gay film ever made, and one of the most beautiful.

→ [Full review: Querelle](/articles/querelle)

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) A Pakistani-British man and his white working-class childhood friend build a laundrette and fall in love in Thatcher's London. Hanif Kureishi's screenplay crackles. The desire is real. The politics are inseparable from the romance.

→ [Full review: My Beautiful Laundrette](/articles/my-beautiful-laundrette)

Maurice (1987) Merchant Ivory adapt E.M. Forster's posthumously published novel about two Cambridge men in love at the turn of the century. Hugh Grant, James Wilby, Rupert Graves. The film Forster couldn't publish in his lifetime, made with everything it deserved.

→ [Full review: Maurice](/articles/maurice)

My Own Private Idaho (1991) Gus Van Sant rewrites Henry IV as a gay road movie. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Narcolepsy and longing and the Pacific Northwest rendered as fever dream. The campfire speech is one of the finest scenes in American cinema.

→ [Full review: My Own Private Idaho](/articles/my-own-private-idaho)

The Crying Game (1992) A British soldier, an IRA operative, a woman who is not what she first appears. Neil Jordan's film works its way toward a definition of desire that has nothing to do with category, and everything to do with the specific person in front of you.

→ [Full review: The Crying Game](/articles/the-crying-game)

Beautiful Thing (1996) Two teenage boys on a South London council estate fall in love over one long summer. Mama Cass on the soundtrack. The gentlest, most specific gay coming-of-age film in British cinema.

→ [Full review: Beautiful Thing](/articles/beautiful-thing)

Paris Is Burning (1990) Jennie Livingston's documentary about New York's ballroom scene — the Black and Latino gay and trans performers who built a culture of beauty and self-invention in the margins of a city that mostly preferred not to see them. A document of genius.

→ [Full review: Paris Is Burning](/articles/paris-is-burning)

Brokeback Mountain (2005) Two ranch hands. Wyoming. Twenty years. Ang Lee's film broke into mainstream culture in a way that no gay film had managed before it, and it did so without softening anything. The grief in it is total.

→ [Full review: Brokeback Mountain](/articles/brokeback-mountain)

I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor in a true story about a con man who keeps escaping from prison to get back to the man he loves. Funny, wild, genuinely romantic, and almost entirely overlooked.

→ [Full review: I Love You Phillip Morris](/articles/i-love-you-phillip-morris)

Weekend (2011) Friday night to Sunday morning. Two men in Nottingham. Andrew Haigh's film is the most honest account of what it feels like to meet someone who might matter — the talking, the sex, the specific terror of beginning to care.

→ [Full review: Weekend](/articles/weekend)

Milk (2008) Gus Van Sant directs Sean Penn as Harvey Milk — the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, and the man whose assassination became the galvanising event of the modern gay rights movement. Penn gives the performance of his career.

→ [Full review: Milk](/articles/milk)

Behind the Candelabra (2013) Steven Soderbergh's HBO film about Liberace and his young lover Scott Thorson. Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, both extraordinary. Excess, devotion, surgery, betrayal. A love story dressed in rhinestones.

→ [Full review: Behind the Candelabra](/articles/behind-the-candelabra)

Moonlight (2016) Three chapters in the life of a Black gay man in Miami — child, teenager, adult — shot with a tenderness and visual precision that no American film had previously brought to this story. Barry Jenkins made something that will last.

→ [Full review: Moonlight](/articles/moonlight)

Call Me by Your Name (2017) Guadagnino's film of André Aciman's novel. Elio and Oliver. A summer in northern Italy. The peach. The letter. The fireplace. The most purely sensory film about desire — not just gay desire, all desire — in recent cinema.

→ [Full review: Call Me by Your Name](/articles/call-me-by-your-name)

God's Own Country (2017) A young Yorkshire farmer and a Romanian migrant worker. Francis Lee's debut feature is the antidote to Brokeback's romanticism — same emotional territory, mud and cold and physical labour, a love story that earns every feeling it produces.

→ [Full review: God's Own Country](/articles/gods-own-country)

All of Us Strangers (2023) Andrew Haigh's second film on this list, twelve years after Weekend. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in a ghost story about grief, childhood, and the men we become when we finally let ourselves be loved. Devastating.

→ [Full review: All of Us Strangers](/articles/all-of-us-strangers)

Passages (2023) Ira Sachs directs Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos in a film about desire as pure disruption. Explicit, unsentimental, Parisian, and completely committed to the idea that the body tells truths that the mind won't.

→ [Full review: Passages](/articles/passages)

Queer (2024) Luca Guadagnino returns with Daniel Craig as William Lee — a thinly fictionalised William Burroughs — adrift in 1950s Mexico City, obsessed with a younger man. Desire as addiction, as hallucination, as the only thing that makes being alive feel real.

→ [Full review: Queer](/articles/queer)

What These Films Share

They are not all comfortable. Several of them are devastating. A few are formally strange, resistant, not designed for easy consumption. What they share is seriousness — the conviction that gay desire and gay experience are worth the full weight of cinematic craft, that these stories deserve the best cinematography, the best performances, the most rigorous direction available.

That conviction is what [BoysDo](https://boysdo.com) is built on. Not the commodification of gay male desire, but its genuine celebration — the belief that what gay men find beautiful is worth a platform that takes it as seriously as they do.

These films built the visual and emotional vocabulary that platform inherits. Watch them slowly. Watch them more than once. They reward the kind of attention this platform was designed for.

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Part of the BoysDo editorial series. Explore the platform at [boysdo.com](https://boysdo.com).