While there’s never a BAD time to watch these films, October is an especially good time to enjoy them, while also reflecting on how far members of the LGBTQA+ community have come, and the struggles they’ve had to endure to get here. (But mostly, enjoy them.)
1. Alex Strangelove
This is the simplest summary I can give you: Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy meets boy. Things get complicated. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s relatable – a must see.
2. Love, Simon
If you haven’t heard of Love, Simon yet, where have you been?? It’s a groundbreaking rom-com about a gay high schooler falling in love with his anonymous pen-pal, while trying not to let his blackmailer forcibly out him to the entire school. (If you don’t cry after he comes out to his mom, where is your soul?)
3. Disobedience
Rachel McAdams really broke free from her classic heteroromantic roles with this one, playing an Orthodox Jewish woman in love with her childhood best friend in this darkly romantic story about a forbidden love (yeah that was cliche, but it works).
4. Brokeback Mountain
I will never in my life get over the injustice that this movie has suffered. It’s a truly beautiful love story (with amazing acting and cinematography) but has been reduced to being known simply as the “gay cowboy movie”. It is soooo much more than that, just trust me.
5. Rent
This is the classic gay musical. You got it all: gay male relationships, lesbian relationships, Idina Menzel is bisexual, Angel is a drag queen – there’s so much happening! But yes, at the end of the day, when the last notes of the absolute bops have faded away, it’s a sad story about people struggling with their sexuality and the AIDS epidemic. Sad, but worth the watch.