Top 50 Favorite Gay Films

A few weeks ago we asked readers to submit up to five of their favorite movies in our third annual favorite gay film poll. We wanted to see which older gay films have timeless appeal and which recent gay films you judged important enough to register in the rankings.

After voting closed we sorted through the nearly 15,000 nominations (representing over 500 individual titles) to identify your top fifty favorite gay films.

Tabulating this data is actually a bit harder than it sounds. For instance, do you know how many different ways our readers can type/abbreviate "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert?" We counted about a dozen!

But we're not complaining, because the list that resulted this year is actually rather interesting.

Nine new films made their way into the rankings, and five of these are of very recent vintage. This represents a strong showing for current queer cinema. Of the new films, Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009) made the strongest impression on AfterElton.com readers, landing all the way at #6.

We specifically noted that documentaries were eligible for nomination in this movie poll, and yet only one documentary made it into the top 50. Ironically, it's a film about gay representation in film: The Celluloid Closet at #47.

Meanwhile, TV films had a strong showing, with HBO's Angels in America at #22, Lifetime's Prayers for Bobby at #17, and Just a Question of Love (Juste un question d'amour) at #18. Not bad for a decade old small French TV movie!

The oldest film on our list is The Boys in the Band (1970) at #33, but most films are of fairly recent vintage. Only six titles on our list were released prior to 1990 - and nearly two thirds come from the aughts (2000-2010).

But that’s enough of an intro. Let’s get to the list itself!