In recognition of Pride Month, Nicholas Sheppard lists the top 10 essential LGBT-themed novels to read, and films to watch.
Set in New York City during the 1950s, Carol tells the story of a forbidden affair between an aspiring female photographer and an older woman going through a difficult divorce. Cate Blanchett imbues Carol with refinement and elegance, through which the character’s deeper feelings and motivations flicker and gleam. The film is redolent of a long-vanished era, and yet compellingly modern, but the real strength of the film is the very human disruptions, abrupt surges of feeling and revelation, and sense of relinquishing control, as a love affair unfolds.
A late-career highlight from Albert Finney, who plays Alfie, an ebullient and endearing late-middle-aged bus conductor in 1960s Dublin. Alfie corrals locals into his amateur theatre troupe to put on a production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. In a poignantly painful climactic scene, the closeted Alfie, dressed in a Wildean get-up, visits a local pub. The patrons condescendingly indulge his eccentricity, but there is a mounting sense of dread. Alfie’s relinquishing of a lifetime of inhibition, in propositioning a working-class young man, is viciously and heartrendingly rebuffed.
Featuring an excellent turn from Rupert Everett, The Happy Prince depicts Oscar Wilde living out his last days in exile, observing his difficulties and failures with ironic detachment and the wit that defined his life. The numerous portrayals of Wilde over the years have somehow failed to ‘get’ him, with Peter Finch’s oddly austere performance in 1960, and Stephen Fry’s diffident 1997 version. Everett gets closest, in this overdue depiction of the melancholy, pathetic, sometimes charming last act of Wilde’s life.
Released in 1951, based on an equally daring book, it’s hard to believe this female-directed, brazenly Sapphic film ever made it to the big screen. In the late 19th century, Olivia, an English teenager, arrives at a finishing school in France, which differs greatly from her former restrictive English boarding school.
Olivia becomes fascinated with headmistress Mademoiselle Julie, who takes Olivia to Paris on a day trip. Olivia becomes more and more obsessed with Mlle Julie. The film’s humid and highly strung atmosphere is striking, even today.
Chiron, a young African-American boy, endures the struggles of an unstable upbringing, dangerous community and malignly detached mother. He finds guidance of a sorts in Juan, a drug dealer, and fleeting expression and release of his sexuality. Mahershala Ali, as Juan, and Naomie Harris as Chiron’s mother, are incredible, and Barry Jenkins’ camerawork and pacing give us a sense of raw, unabashed intimacy in this worthy Oscar Best Picture winner. Chiron, as a child, asking Juan if he sells his mother drugs, is one of the most devastating exchanges in modern cinema.
Featuring a career-defining performance from Hillary Swank, Boys Don’t Cry is a dramatisation of the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a young trans man who attempts to find himself, and love, in Nebraska but falls victim to a brutal hate crime perpetrated by two male acquaintances. Ahead of its time, and as relevant as ever, Brandon’s resilience, and faltering efforts to remain integrated in an intolerant corner of the Midwest makes for difficult viewing, with a sexual assault scene particularly gruelling. Nevertheless, the tenderness, and bold self-acceptance shine through.
Beautiful in its own right, Brokeback Mountain went on to have a considerable cultural impact. It was the defining Hollywood multiplex film that, through the staunch and laconic Heath Ledger’s Ennis in particular, provided a mainstream audience a permission structure to see gay attraction, and relationships, in a more tolerant light. This was due in part to the performances, but also to the broad swathes of time the screenplay covers – across decades of the characters’ relationship, subverting tropes about the superficiality of queer life, and presenting a third act that explores the profound aches of passing time, loss and memory.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, follows Adele, an introverted 15-year-old student who passes an older girl with short blue hair in the streets and is instantly attracted. The film depicts their relationship from Adele’s high school years to her early adult life.
Director Abdellatif Kechiche reflected that he felt a jealousy of sorts for the young characters - their less-inhibited sexual personae, their digitally connected and vibrant social milieu - and the film absolutely streams with the sensitivities, the hurtling emotion and rawness of youth. The close-up camerawork and many of Kechiche’s directorial decisions give the film a bracing, intimate realism.
In the summer of 1983, Elio, a 17-year-old Jewish Italian boy, lives with his parents in rural Northern Italy. Elio’s father, a professor of archaeology, invites an American graduate student, Oliver, to live with the family over the summer and help with his academic work. Sun-shot and glistening, with a moving soundtrack featuring Sufjan Stevens, the film rises above the erotic to stir more sensitive feelings about the pangs of first love, the deluge of new adult sensations and emotional stakes, and both the glut of firsts, which few youngsters are truly ready for, and the weight of loss, which few are truly ready to withstand.
At the film’s end, Oliver calls Elio’s family to tell them he is engaged to be married to a woman he has been seeing. After the call, Elio sits down by the fireplace and, in a tenderly lingering shot, stares into the flames, tearfully reflecting.
Daring for its time, this Jean Delannoy-directed film explores the secret tendresse between two boys in a strict religious boarding school in the 1920s. The title translates as “the special friendships”, the boys arrange trysts whenever they can, professing their feelings in letters. The interventions of the priests, who discourage the relationship as sinful, leads to the younger Alexandre’s suicide. Despite the largely chaste bond between the boys, the film attracted controversy upon its release in 1964, but was also praised for its sensitivity, as well as for the charming performance of a young Didier Haudepin.
“As good as the English novel gets,” was the Sunday Telegraph’s summation of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize-winning masterpiece, The Line of Beauty. There are impeccable touches on literally every page. As the boom years of the 80s unfold, young Nick Guest enters into a first affair with a black council worker named Leo. When, years later, Leo’s sister tracks down Nick to tell him of Leo’s passing from Aids, the description is as harrowing as any on the subject will ever be:
“The last photo she had shown him was terrible: a Leo with his life behind him… He was in bed, in a sky-blue hospital gown; his face was hard to read, since Aids had taken it and written its message of terror and exhaustion on it; against which Leo seemed frailly to assert his own character in a doubtful half smile.”
Louche, and with a fin-de-siecle lusciousness, Oscar Wilde’s only novel attracted at least as much notoriety as acclaim. The charming Lord Wotton channels his Dionysian nature through the beautiful young Dorian Gray. As his portrait ages, and he himself remains beautiful and ageless, Dorian cruises the streets of London. We get glimpses of the Victorian “Uranian” underground; the “Meat-rack” in Piccadilly:
“As I lounged in the park or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me and wondered with a mad curiosity what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me, others filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations.”
Rainbow Milk is a semi-autobiographical debut novel - a raw and unfiltered look at race and sexuality in modern Britain. It tells the story of 19-year-old Jesse McCarthy, grappling with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. Jesse seeks a fresh start in London. At a loss for a new centre of gravity, he turns to sex work.
Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race and sexuality, featuring unsparing depictions of sexuality. One of the most shocking scenes involves a very young Jesse, so beset with internalised hatred and a sense of “otherness” that he takes a metal scouring pad and rubs his skin raw in a bid to “clean away” his darker colour.
A feast of a novel, generous in scope and expression, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Middlesex became a bestseller. The novel’s main themes are nature versus nurture, rebirth and gender identity. Narrator and protagonist Cal Stephanides, initially called “Callie”, is an intersex man. The latter half of the novel focuses on Cal’s experiences in his hometown of Detroit and his escape to San Francisco, where he comes to terms with his modified gender identity.
The New York Times Book Review considered Middlesex one of the best books of 2002. It garnered positive praise from the medical, gay, and intersex communities.
A work of vaulting ambition, Jamie O’Neill’s first novel is evocative of Irish literary greats such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Set just prior to the Easter Uprising of 1916, At Swim, Two Boys is a story of two teenagers, Jim and Doyler. Out at the Forty Foot, a promontory where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim and, in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will venture to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim the island for themselves. War, upheaval and other forces turn about them, as their burgeoning friendship evolves.
James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room focuses on the life of a bisexual American man named David, living in Paris. David begins an affair with an Italian man, Giovanni, whom he meets at a gay bar.
Giovanni’s Room is noteworthy for the empathy and artistry with which it brought complex representations of homosexuality and bisexuality, gender and sexual identity crisis to the page, engendering a broader discourse regarding same-sex desire.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a 1985 coming-of-age story about a young girl named Jeanette, who is adopted by evangelists from the Pentecostal Church. Jeanette believes she is destined to become a missionary. As an adolescent, she finds herself attracted to another girl.
The novel’s themes include transition from youth to adulthood, complex family relationships, and organised religion. Reflecting its widespread recognition and literary merit, the novel has been included on school reading lists in England.
The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Set in the early 1900s, the novel is a powerful work encompassing race, gender, misogyny, patriarchal violence and the troubled, arrested and often-erased black experience in the broader American narrative. In addition, Alice Walker left no ambiguities about the romance between Celie and Shug Avery. There is love, tenderness and care between these two characters.
Alan Hollinghurst again. In the summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. Filled with intimacies, the weekend will link the families forever, after Cecil writes a poem, Two Acres, about the house, a poem that will become a touchstone for the period in English history. What unfolds is a century-long cavalcade of changing social, sexual and cultural attitudes, unfolding in elegant, seductive, richly textured prose exploring queer lives, from the secretive inferences of Edwardian society, all the way to the digital expediency of Grindr.
The 2020 Man Booker Prize-winner Shuggie Bain was described by the judges as “an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love”. Shuggie is a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow’s filthy tenements, whose mother suffers the “screaming in her bones” of alcoholism. The reader hopes desperately for both characters to persevere and find solace. Throughout are scenes of wrenching pathos, such as when Shuggie’s mother, at the local store, with hardly any dole money left, dispenses with food essentials for the family, one by one, ensuring she can still afford a six-pack of lager. The chronicle of a woman’s disintegration, the novel is also a tender narrative of a boy’s self-discovery.
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