Reel Love

1. Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and Corky (Gina Gershon) in Bound (1996)
Who’d have thought that Hollywood’s best lesbian love story would come from a pair of straight guys? This debut feature by the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) is a sexy, smart, Sapphic noir: playing a hot butch ex-con, Gershon hooks up with femme fatale Tilly, and the pair hatch up a plan to steal $2 million from Violet’s mobster boyfriend. In the end, not only does the girl get the girl, but they drive off with a pick-up truck full of cash to the tune of Tom Jones’s She’s a Lady.

2. Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Clashes over race, class and gender are navigated with wit, compassion and intelligence in this Thatcher-era gem. Stephen Frears’s film is a realist take on a well-to-do British Pakistani family torn between the seductive pull of capitalism and the self-righteous activism of the radical left. Warnecke and Day-Lewis play childhood friends turned lovers turned laundromat entrepreneurs. A banner film in what would become known as the Queer New Wave.

3. Max (Guinevere Turner) and Ely (V.S. Brodie) Go Fish (1994)
Director Rose Troche’s charming, comic, black-and-white, no-budget indie made a splash at Sundance, revealing to the world the peculiar foibles of lesbian dating — like going home with someone who has “a hundred different kinds of tea, all decaf” in her apartment. Despite the many obstacles thrown in their path, sarcastic Max and hippy-ish Ely eventually make a tartly realistic love match. Like the film’s tagline advises: never give up, “the girl is out there.”

4. Jamie (Glen Berry) and Ste (Scott Neal) in Beautiful Thing (1996)
If the relationship between Jamie and Ste, two working-class teenagers living in a British housing project, seems a little too rose-coloured, it doesn’t make this delightful wisp of a romantic comedy any less endearing. These two awkward boys even receive a benediction of sorts from Jamie’s accepting, if ditzy, mom Sandra (Linda Henry), who comforts her son by telling him that there is a refuge where gay people can live in peace: “It’s an island in the Mediterranean called Lesbian.”

5. Wilhelmina (Michelle Krusiec) and Vivian (Lynn Chen) in Saving Face (2005)
Writer/director Alice Wu adroitly explores the generation gap between Wilhelmina, a twentysomething doctor, her widowed, homophobic mother (Joan Chen) and her traditional grandparents (Guang Lan Koh and Jin Wang) in this rare portrait of love between two Asian-American women. Closeted Wil falls in love with the beautiful free spirit Vivian and must balance her relationship with the demands of her mother, who has recently disgraced her family with a scandal of her own.

6. Michael (Richard Ganoung) and Nick (Steve Buscemi) in Parting Glances (1986)
Director Bill Sherwood’s only feature (he died of AIDS in 1990), Parting Glances centres around the final 24 hours of Robert (John Bolger) and Michael’s relationship as Robert gets ready to leave for a job in Africa. But the real love affair here is between Michael and his ex-boyfriend Nick (one of Buscemi’s best performances), who is dying of AIDS. A moving look at the complexities of love and friendship that perfectly captures the early days of the AIDS epidemic in New York.

7. Vivian (Helen Shaver) and Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) in Desert Hearts (1986)
This lesbian classic contains one of the most emotionally raw seduction scenes in cinema. Set in the 1950s, Vivian is a reserved professor on a six-week holiday in Nevada awaiting a quickie Reno divorce when she meets and falls for the fetching Cay, a liberated (for the era) lesbian casino dealer. The film’s ambiguous ending — will they or won’t they stay together? — speaks to both the impossibility and inevitability of their love.

8. Buzz (Jason Alexander) and James (John Glover) in Love! Valor! Compassion! (1997)
In this Big Chill-ish offering, a group of gay men gather at a country home over several summertime long weekends, testing the bonds of their friendship, falling in and out of love and coping with loneliness and aging. At the heart of the film is the tender and doting relationship between two gentle, older men — fey Buzz and the even feyer, HIV-positive James — a surprising, affecting coupling in a world that still views love as the prerogative of the young, flat-bellied and healthy.

9. Randy (Laurel Holloman) and Evie (Nicole Parker) in The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995)
A big-hearted story of an unlikely friendship — and even unlikelier relationship — between two high school students: tomboy misfit Randy, who makes out with her older married girlfriend during her breaks at her gas station job, and popular, upper-class Evie. Director Maria Maggenti steers their teenaged angsty, emotionally charged affair with warmth and grace.

10. Arnold (Harvey Fierstein) and Alan (Matthew Broderick) in Torch Song Trilogy (1988)
An adaptation of Fierstein’s long-running stage hit, Torch Song Trilogy tells the story of drag performer Arnold’s life, from dressing up in his mother’s clothes as a kid; to falling for Alan, the love of his life; to his coming to terms with Alan’s death. Verging at times on melodrama, the film is nonetheless both an intimate portrayal of loss and a rallying cry for a generation of gay men facing the devastating ravages of AIDS. Fighting with his mother (Anne Bancroft), who is dismissive of Arnold’s grief, he tells her: “There are two things I demand from the people in my life. Love and respect.”

Early gay-themed films like The Children’s Hour (1961) and Tea and Sympathy (1956) might be forgiven their morose tone. Homosexuality was not even legal then, let alone socially condoned. Oddly enough, it’s some of the later films that are the worst offenders; the ones that want to capitalize on a burgeoning gay chicness by featuring same-sex couples, while pandering to mainstream squeamishness by obscuring the nature of their relationship. Here are three of the most egregious examples.

1. Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker) in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
Set in 1930s and the present day, lifelong friends Idgie and cancer-doomed Ruth pledge their lives to one another after Idgie rescues Ruth from an abusive husband. But this Southern-fried feminist fable so glosses over the attraction between the pair that it renders the film’s girl-power message practically impotent.

2. Gareth (Simon Callow) and Matthew (John Hannah) in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Another ambiguously gay duo, the life-embracing Gareth and his quietly handsome boyfriend Matthew are so discreet as to be almost invisible in this Hugh Grant vehicle about a quirky group of friends. In fact, no one seems to be aware of the profundity of their relationship until Matthew reads Funeral Blues, W.H. Auden’s elegy to his dead lover, at Gareth’s funeral.

3. Andrew (Tom Hanks) and Miguel (Antonio Banderas) in Philadelphia (1993)
The victim of director Jonathan Demme’s good intentions, this redemption story, about a lawyer fired from his firm for being HIV-positive, presents gay life as neutered and passionless. As a couple so non-threatening that even Pat Robertson would love them, Hanks and Banderas barely bring themselves to hug. Meanwhile, as a stand-in for what Demme presumes to be a hostile audience, Denzel Washington plays Andrew’s homophobic, ambulance-chasing lawyer, who finally accepts Andrew for who he is — once Andrew is dead.