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Independent Films

Outside of the mainstream, several smaller, independent films that were not made specifically for gay audiences also featured gay themes. One example was The History Boys, a mostly successful screen adaptation of Alan Bennett's wildly successful play, which was a smash in London before it moved to Broadway and swept the Tony Awards last year. The film is ostensibly about education, but as the story — about a group of precocious students studying for their entrance interviews to Oxbridge — progresses, gay themes tumble out. Gay students, straight students and gay teachers (including the wonderful Richard Griffiths as a somewhat tragic gay professor) fumble for truth and dominance. The result is a frothy, if uneven, discussion of the transference of knowledge.

Gay teens also featured prominently in limited-release films like Quinceañera (which featured a Latino gay teen lead) and The Architect, which explored a relationship between a frustrated, middle-class white kid and a well-adjusted gay black youth.

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald, who has made several films exploring gay identity and gay life (The Hanging Garden, The Event, Beefcake) released his globe-spanning AIDS film, 3 Needles, this year to coincide with World AIDS Day. Interestingly, the film features no gay characters; the stories that it tells in China, South Africa and Montreal take place outside of the gay community entirely. But the continued devastation that the virus causes to the gay community made 3 Needles a significant film for gay audiences, regardless.

Running With Scissors, based on gay writer Augusten Burroughs' memoir of the same name, featured a wildly unhinged (and some say Oscar-worthy) performance by Annette Bening as Augusten's self-absorbed, pill-popping, somewhat Sapphic, poet mother, but the film didn't seem to catch on at the box office. Great supporting turns by Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill Clayburgh, Brian Cox and Evan Rachel Wood — not to mention the fantastic lead performance by Joseph Cross as Augusten — were lost amid the story's rambling structure, much as the characters themselves were lost inside the Finches' sprawling, crumbling home. But it's refreshing to see a film where the gay kid is easily the most well-adjusted person in the house.

In the film adaptation of gay writer Armistead Maupin's wonderfully creepy, semi-autobiographical novel The Night Listener, Robin Williams played a gay radio storyteller who befriends a mysterious young writer and his caretaker over the phone. Having just been dumped by his younger, HIV-positive lover, Williams' character is vulnerable to the precocious young writer. The film is worth seeing for Toni Collette's fascinating turn as the boy's caretaker, and Bobby Cannavale delivers a touching performance as the ex who simply needs to enjoy being alive again.

In the misguided film version of the hit series Strangers With Candy, Stephen Colbert plays a closeted gay teacher to Amy Sedaris' wonderfully disgusting, ex-junkie hooker, Jerri Blank. The film boasted a host of big cameos, but they were more distracting than anything else, and most fans found that the heart of the television show just didn't translate to the big screen.

And gay writer-director Brian Sloan's semi-autobiographical 9/11 drama, WTC View, featured several gay and straight characters — including a gay lead — coping with the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.

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