Slant's The 100 Best LGBTQ Movies of All Time

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Cinema isn’t the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can be among the most powerful.

Published on June 18, 2020

This list includes all versions of Slant Magazine's LGBTQ movies. View the list history to find the previous versions. All lists are chronological.

V1: "50 Essential LGBT Films" June 27, 2013 (also the same as SanderO's icm list)
V2: "The 75 Greatest LGBT Films of All Time" June 21, 2016
V3: "The 100 Best LGBTQ Movies of All Time" June 7, 2019
V4: "The 100 Best LGBTQ Movies of All Time" June 18, 2020 (current version)

Original Intro:

"You’ve sported a red equal sign on Facebook, watched Nancy Pelosi show Michele Bachmann her politically correct middle finger, and read some of those other lists that have compiled lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) films, hailing usual suspects like High Art and Brokeback Mountain as gay equivalents of Vertigo (oh, don’t Citizen Kane me; we’re talking regime upheaval here). Now, as you continue to celebrate the crushing of DOMA and Prop 8 (and toss some extra confetti for Pride Month while you’re at it), peruse Slant’s own list of LGBT movies you owe it to yourself to see. Curated by co-founder and film editor Ed Gonzalez, this 50-wide roster is a singular trove of queer-themed gems and classics, spanning the past eight decades and reflecting artists as diverse as Kenneth Anger, Derek Jarman, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You won’t find The Birdcage among our ranks, but you will find Paul Morrissey’s Trash, Ira Sach’s The Delta, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy. Consider the list a hat tip to what’s shaped up to be a banner LGBT year, particularly on screen, with lesbian romance Blue Is the Warmest Color taking top honors at Cannes, and Xavier Dolan releasing the masterful Laurence Anyways, which also made our cut. R. Kurt Osenlund"

Second Intro:

"Last week, in the aftermath of the attack on Orlando's Pulse nightclub, one call to action rose above the din: “Say their names.” New Yorkers chanted it steps from the Stonewall Inn. The mother of a child gunned down at Sandy Hook penned it in an open letter. The Orlando Sentinel printed the names. Anderson Cooper recited them. A gunman murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the wee hours of that awful Sunday, massacring LGBTQ people of color and their allies in the middle of Pride Month, and the commemoration of the dead demanded knowing who they were. “These,” as MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell urged his viewers, “are the names to remember.”

In the midst of mourning, the titles herein seem to me more essential than ever, a globe-spanning, multigenerational testament to our existence in a world where our erasure is no abstraction. From Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael to Todd Haynes's Carol, naming and seeing emerge, intertwined, as radical acts—acts of becoming (Sally Potter's Orlando) and acts of being (Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason), acts of speech (Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied) and acts of show (Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning) that together reaffirm the revolutionary potential of the seventh art. “My name is Harvey Milk,” the San Francisco supervisor, memorialized in Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk, proclaimed in 1978, less than one year before his assassination. “And I'm here to recruit you!”

The cinema isn't the sole mechanism for making our presence known, but it can, if the films listed below are any indication, be among the most powerful, projecting the complexities of the LGBTQ experience onto the culture's largest, brightest mirror. There's rage here, and also love; isolation, and communal spirit; fear, and the forthright resistance to it. These films are essential because we are essential: The work of ensuring that we aren't erased or forgotten continues apace, and the struggle stretches into a horizon that no screen, no matter its size, can quite capture. But this is surely a place to start. Matt Brennan"

Third & Fourth intros are essentially the same.