In honour of BFI Flare, the LGBT film festival which launches on 16 March, we’ve made a timeline of the most significant moments and must-see films in queer cinema. Enjoy.
1895 The first notable form of homosexuality depicted in film was in 1895 as two men danced together in the William Kennedy Dickson motion picture The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Film critic Parker Tyler stated that the scene “shocked audiences with its subversion of conventional male behaviour.”
1922 Birth of openly gay director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), who was one of the great Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s. Much of his oeuvre, incluidng Teorema (1968) laid the path for other filmmakers to tackle LGBT subjects.
1968 Lonesome Cowboys by Andy Warhol: loosely based on Romeo & Juliet and a satire of Hollywood westerns. It won the Best Film Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
1969 Midnight Cowboy. The Oscar-winning film stars Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as a con man and a Texas hustler trying to survive on the tough streets of New York and features a ground-breaking gay sex scene.
1987 The Teddy Award, an international film award for films with LGBT topics is launched at the Berlin International Film Festival.
1987 Law of Desire or La ley del Deseo by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Antonio Banderas, is a complex love triangle between three men. It is Almodóvar’s first work to focus on homosexual relationships.
1988 German lesbian filmmaker Monika Treut’s Virgin Machine is released with one of the first overtly lesbian storylines. A journalist (Ina Blum) leaves behind a boyfriend in Germany and moves to San Francisco, where she gets involved with a lesbian stripper (Shelly Mars).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPVNyb3q5Yo
1991 Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, starring heartthrob River Phoenix as a narcoleptic male hustler who hooks up with Keanu Reeves’ character Scott, who does not believe men can really love each other.
1992 Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton, based on Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name about a character who switches gender halfway through their life, casting gender-identity issues onto the big screen.
1992 Academic B.Ruby Rich uses the term “New Queer Cinema” in Sight & Sound magazine to define the rise in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s which starts to adress overtly gay themes with nuanced characters.
1999 But I’m a Cheerleader, a satirical romantic comedy directed by Jamie Babbit about a cute, popular cheerleader whose parents send her to a boot camp to stop her being gay.
2005 Multi-award-winning, commercial and critical success, Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as gay men struggling to accept their feelings for each other. It proved gay storylines could pull in big bucks at the box office.
2010 The Queer Palm is founded by journalist Franck Finance-Madureira as an LGBT prize for films at the Cannes Film Festival.
2013 Palme D’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Colour stars newcomers Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux as two lovers in this coming-of age 179 minute epic from director Abdellatif Kechiche.
2015 Tangerine, a comedy-drama directed by Sean Baker about a transgender prostitute who learns that her pimp boyfriend has been unfaithful and sets out with her best friend to enact revenge.
2015 Carol, adapted for the screen by Phyllis Nagy, is based on the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt. It tells the story of a forbidden affair between an aspiring female photographer and an older woman going through a divorce in 1950s New York. Cate Blanchett stars.
2016 Moonlight wins Best Picture at the Oscars.
2016 In Disney’s live-action film of Beauty and the Beast, LeFou has a crush on Gaston, making it the first overtly gay relationship in a Disney film.
Have we missed any of your favourites? please suggest more to add to the timeline in the comments box below