In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month, we’re singling out 50 essential LGBTQ films - from comedies to dramas, documentaries to cult classics, underground experimental work to studio blockbusters. Some have been documents of a moment or era of gay history, some have been used as correctives to decades of negative clichés, and others have simply celebrated the fact that the movies can be queer, they’re here, get used to it. But since those two men first danced, there have also been scores of stories, characters, and filmmakers that have presented the varied, multitudinous aspects of LGBTQ experiences 24 frames per second that have gone past those stereotypes, or flipped them on their heads. That clip appears in The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary based on Vito Russo’s study of homosexuality in the movies, along with countless examples of how gay characters showed up, per narrator Lily Tomlin, as “something to laugh at, or something to pity, or even something to fear.” The history of representation is long, and extremely storied, often shaping how the public viewed “the love that dare not speak its name” for better or worse. It’s considered by many to be one of the first examples of gay imagery in film, and a reminder that homosexual representation has been with the medium from the very beginning. While there’s nothing to outright suggest that these men were romantically involved or attracted to each other during the roughly 20-second length of their pas de deux, there is nothing that contradicts that notion either. It’s known as “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” and dates back to 1895, the same year movies were born.
It was an experimental short made by William Dickson, designed to test syncing up moving pictures to prerecorded sound, a system that he and Thomas Edison were developing known as the Kinetophone. But this brief footage is not so ancient that you can’t clearly make out two men, waltzing together, as a third man plays a violin in the background. Here are eight movies on Netflix which explore sexuality in all its explicit glory (while avoiding the glory holes, but we can leave that to It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.It’s grainy, faded, and, given the clip is now 125 years old, more than a little worse for wear.
Perhaps it's a sign of how far we've come that such a mainstream platform for online entertainment boasts a number of films which feature unsimulated sex, while at the same time having something more to say about sexuality and the human relationships surrounding it. There aren't an abundance of sexually explicit movies available (in fact, there's very little besides the films listed here) but what there is covers some impressive ground: sexual infidelity, youthful experimentation, sex addiction and even arousal through self-mutilation are all intimately explored. While Netflix don't do "porn", it's refreshing that the majority of the films on this list stand on their merits as impressive works of cinema, avoiding sensationalism and offering far more than crude titillation. It's hardly a surprising reaction, given that sex is one of the primary drives of human nature. Whether it's admitted or not, people are inherently drawn to the rude and lurid, their libidinal impulses triggered by the sight of curving bodies pressing up against one another.
There is always going to be a degree of salacious appeal in an article examining "sexually explicit" movies.