Gay Sex Scenes That Made Movie History

Latter Days (2003)
Latter Days is a nicely produced, possibly overambitious film that portrays a young gay Mormon man who falls in love with an actor/waiter in Los Angeles while doing his missionary work. The film dips into melodrama once or twice, but their relationship, including a beautiful and erotic sex scene in an airport hotel, is extremely sweet and romantic. A happy ending and Mormon underwear — it's a first.

Steve Sandvos (left) and Wes Ramsey in Latter Days

Hotness: 8
Romance: 8
Significance: 7

HellBent (2004)

Dylan Fergus in Hellbent

In just about every slasher film ever made, there's at least one couple who gets shredded while having sex in some out-of-the way spot. And HellBent is no exception. What makes it exceptional is something else entirely: Everyone in it is a gay man, and they're all having sex with apparently no guilt, remorse or second thoughts.

HellBent was the brainchild of writer-director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts and Joseph Wolf (Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street). It's set at West Hollywood 's Halloween Carnival and focuses on a group of gay men just trying to make it through the night without getting killed. There's no gay-bashing angle, just your standard teen slasher flick with hot gay men standing in for hetero teens.

One couple gets killed after having sex in a car, and the lead guy and his new fella have a big sex scene at the end before the killer attacks them. As ever in slasher flicks, the wages of sex are apparently violent death, but it's the sexual orientation-neutral approach that makes HellBent a queer film first.

Hotness: 5
Romance: 5
Significance: 10

Brother to Brother(2004)
Brother to Brother focuses on Perry (Anthony Mackie), a young gay artist who has been thrown out of his family home after his parents find out he's gay, and his friendship with Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson), a down-on-his-luck poet and artist who was in his youth an intimate of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and other famous figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

In an tale told in black-and-white flashbacks, viewers see the artistic, political and sexual struggles of the circle around Hughes interwoven with Perry's experiences as a gay man in the black community, as a black man in the gay world, as a student and as an artist.

A controversial element of the film's sex scenes is that, with one unclear exception, every single sex act is between a black and a white man. Perry and his friends do discuss the racial issues in his short affair with a white fellow student, but it's still a surprisingly unexplored territory in the film.

The dearth of images of black gay men having sex in the movies can't be overstated, and for that reason this one pretty much goes off the significance meter.

Hotness: 5
Romance: 5
Significance: 10