There haven’t been many films about aging gay men, so it’s always nice to see one that tries to tackle the subject in some capacity. This film is less about love and more about what can happen to certain gay men in the prime of their lives when their families no longer want them and they are deeply lonely. Friendship and love/admiration can bring a spark into your life at any time. The friendship between two old men becomes love in its own way.Slightly unkempt, exhausted, and frail, Philippe Lanctot moves into an old age home. He is single, and apparently his younger sister used to care for him, but after his death, he is almost forced into this community. He is unhappy about it and nearly grumpy. The staff tries to lift his spirits, but it feels as though he has already given up on life. Then a man named Victor suddenly arrives in his room in a wheelchair. He is brash, talks constantly, has no concept of personal space or boundaries, and is a real chatty Kathy. Philippe initially finds him very annoying, but soon begins warming to him, and the two develop a strong friendship in which Victor shows Philippe that being around other people is not so bad. Victor gives Philippe the gift of living in the moment. In return, the well-heeled Philippe arranges outings for dinner and to a botanical garden and, without Victor knowing, becomes his benefactor when Victor’s children get stingy. During one heartfelt conversation, Victor explains that he was married before realizing…

If you watched and loved Season 1 of Gaycation, Season 2 carries on from exactly where it left off, with that same mix of travel series and proper documentary that made the first season feel so real. Elliot Page and Ian Daniel return, this time heading to Ukraine, India, France, and the Deep South in the US. There’s also a special episode exploring what the Trump administration’s policies meant for LGBTQ+ people. The main run consists of four episodes, each around 45 minutes long, before the special brings it all to a close. Ukraine is their first destination, and they arrive in Kyiv shortly before the country’s second ever Pride march. The tension is palpable; Russian influence and the Orthodox Church seem to weigh on everything. They speak with activists who are truly putting their safety on the line simply to march through their own city, with riot police needed because counter protesters are nearby and prepared to turn violent. One of the most affecting moments comes when they meet a gay soldier who cannot come out to the people he serves beside, and it says a lot about how nationalism and war can make queerness feel like a betrayal. They also get a look at the underground rave scene, where music and dancing have quietly become resistance in their own right. In India, the series takes on a huge contradiction: a colonial-era law criminalising gay sex remains on the books, while the culture itself has a long history of hijra and third gender traditions. In Delhi and Mumbai, they…

I put this one off for ages, and honestly, I’m not even sure why. I’d somehow talked myself into thinking it probably wouldn’t connect with my LGBTQ world, but wow, was I wrong. This film totally blindsided me. It’s a smart dark comedy that manages to be properly funny and seriously heavy at exactly the same time, with surprises all the way through. Roman and Dennis are two young strangers who meet at a support group for people who have lost a twin. It’s such a specific, strange kind of grief that only someone who has lived through it could really start to understand. Roman is quiet and physically imposing, and his sudden flashes of rage feel even more disturbing because he is normally so still. Dennis is skinny, openly gay, and armed with sharp self deprecating humour that he uses as a shield. They could not be more different, yet tragedy brings them together, and their connection holds even after Dennis tells Roman he is gay, partly because Roman’s late brother was gay too. The two of them quietly start filling the space left by losing a sibling. Then, around 20 minutes in, the film rewinds and reveals something that changes absolutely everything. Dennis had met Rocky, Roman’s twin, slept with him once, and become completely obsessed. The day he turned up to surprise Rocky was the same day Rocky died in a car accident. Dennis, then, essentially made up a dead twin brother so he could get close to Roman through the support group. Even Dennis is not…

This Indian series is marketed as the story of a gay man falling for his straight best friend, but honestly, underneath that, it’s really about friendship—and what happens when friendship becomes complicated, messy, and emotionally charged. You can watch it on Last Leaf Pictures’ YouTube channel; it has seven episodes, each around 30 minutes long. I had mixed feelings the whole way through, and a lot of that came from how I felt about one of the leads, but I’ll get to that shortly.At the heart of it are Anshul and Kavith. They meet for the first time on a train bound for Delhi, with neither of them particularly ready to return to their hometowns. They get off halfway through the trip, change their minds, and head back to Mumbai for one more chance at the lives they want there. Anshul is an aspiring actor whose young son lives in Delhi with his grandmother. Kavith is gay and newly out of yet another relationship—his 17th, by his own count over the years. They form an unusual friendship, and because they are both financially struggling, they become roommates. Eventually, they grow truly close, supporting one another emotionally and financially in a way that begins to resemble family. Anshul is warm, fair, and open with everyone around him. Kavith completely adores him: he pampers him, fusses over his son, and gazes at Anshul with a starry-eyed devotion that Anshul clearly enjoys receiving. But Kavith is intensely needy where love is concerned. For him, it is never about anything physical; it is all…

Released in 1988, this was apparently HBO's first-ever gay themed TV film. It was adapted from a play, and you can tell almost immediately, since nearly all of it unfolds in an apartment with two people talking through their grief and arguing over whether that grief belongs equally to both of them.The story begins after the death of a man named Colin. His ex-wife Marion, who spent more than a decade with him, and his lover Arthur, who stayed at his side during the brutal last months of his life with AIDS, meet in the loft they have each inherited half of under Colin's will and now have to sell. From there, the two sit with old resentments and fresh ones, orbiting each other, making confessions, and gradually trying to process a loss neither quite knows how to bear. Marion discloses that she has also been infected with the virus. Arthur, understandably, though also somewhat selfishly, wants to believe his grief is the more valid one. They're both shattered, and both need somewhere to direct the blame. Yet as more comes out and their defenses lower a little, the dynamic between them changes, and the tension slowly gives way to understanding and the start of a genuine friendship.What I appreciated was how little the film tries to make any of this big or dramatic. The characters respond as real people probably would: messily, inconsistently, and not always sympathetically. Both lead actors handle it well, and the writing captures how genuinely complicated relationships like these can be. Still, the constant back-and-forth…

This Thai mini series is bad and packed with red flags that make you question so many of the protagonists' motives, and yet somehow, you still wanna keep watching until the end. It is only 10 episodes, 10 minutes each, but it should come with multiple trigger warnings. I thought we had moved past the rape era in the BL world being justified in the name of love a few years back, but apparently not!Pakin kidnaps Venus, the heir to a luxury hotel, and keeps him captive in the unforgiving wilderness. He holds Venus responsible for making his younger brother fall in love with him, then breaking his heart, which led to his brother committing suicide. Venus pleads and begs, insisting it must have been his twin brother Saturn who did this, but Pakin refuses to hear any of it. He rapes Venus, forces him to do household chores, and subjects him to other atrocities. Meanwhile, the hotel heiress grandmother worries about where the town grandsons have disappeared to and asks her trusted advisor to find them. Her evil niece, meanwhile, has been eyeing the entire property and is unhappy that grandma plans to put everything in the twins' name. It turns out she was behind Venus being kidnapped all along. Once she learns about Pakin's younger brother's suicide, she makes Saturn leave the country out of fear for his life and tells Pakin that Venus is Saturn. Anyway, some kind of bond slowly begins to form between Pakin and Venus, and once the truth comes out, everything falls into…

This is a difficult one to pin down, and honestly, that's both its greatest ambition and its biggest flaw. It's a wildly eccentric psychosexual comedy attempting to invent an entirely new genre, and I truly can't think of anything else quite like it. But wanting to be audacious and successfully being audacious are two very different things, and for me, it simply didn't work. And just so expectations are clear, this isn't strictly a gay film. One of the two main characters is gay, and sexuality is definitely part of the discussion, but that's pretty much where the queer aspect ends.Joey and Craig are roommates, and their relationship is warm, though somewhat uneven. He covers the rent while she doesn't, so he can get away with things like making Joey sit in her darkened room when his Grindr date arrives because he's told the guy he lives by himself. The movie begins with Joey talking to her therapist and recounting this long, rambling tale about meeting someone named Brian, sleeping with him, and discovering that he's an alien. The monologue drags on forever, running through her entire messy past with Brian before finally explaining how Craig entered the story. When Brian turns up in their lives again and their apartment becomes more or less uninhabitable, they wind up spending a weekend at his house. Brian possesses this alien power where a simple touch can soothe and subdue anyone he encounters, and naturally, both Joey and Craig are pulled toward him in ways they can't fully control. Joey has tentacle sex…

Honestly, this was such a refreshing film. Rather than leaning into the familiar trans victimhood narrative, it goes somewhere much more nuanced and compelling. It unapologetically allows its trans protagonist to inhabit two spaces usually treated as incompatible for trans characters. She pursues her sexual fantasies while also attempting to create the kind of family life trans people have historically been excluded from. The film’s point is basically that identity holds multitudes, and it refuses to confine her within society’s expectations. A girl can have it all, and this film argues that confidently.The main character is a successful, famous trans theatre actress. She’s fierce, highly sexually active, and entirely unapologetic about it. One night, she meets a gay Mexican lawyer who remained in Argentina, let’s be real, for the hot men. They’re strongly attracted to one another and begin a relationship. He meets her family, and before long it’s obvious that having a relationship hasn’t altered her behaviour whatsoever. She continues hooking up with local men on the side, and their relationship is openly defined as just that: open. The film takes a turn when they choose to adopt a child, and near the end we learn that the child is HIV positive. Yet this shift toward domesticity and building a family doesn’t go over well with her trans friends, who think she’s betraying them by trying to slot herself into a conventional life. At the same time, their relationship develops, changes, and endures plenty of highs and lows. There’s a continual clash between convention and her rebellious, free-spirited side.…

I found this film almost magnetic in a way I couldn't fully explain. Some films have that rare quality where every frame feels worth taking in—the people, the settings, the movement—and this one completely has it. It’s a fictionalised retelling of real moments from the life of dancer and choreographer Rianto, who performs the Lengger dance, a traditional form from his native island of Java in which men adopt feminine appearances and movements.The film follows Juno in something like chapters, with each section capturing a different phase of his life—his childhood, his teenage years—and each one centres on a crisis connected to how the people around him interpret his body and sexuality. Having grown up without a mother figure, Juno is at ease with solitude and isolation. When he is young, a dance master notices the grace and flexibility of his body and recognises him as a natural dancer, yet those same effeminate qualities make him a target for bullying. As a teenager, we see him learning to sew, and much of this chapter focuses on his bond with a boxer from the village. Juno becomes a sort of assistant to him, and the boxer genuinely enjoys his company. The homosexual undertones are unmistakable, and Juno seems utterly captivated by the man’s physicality, viewing him as somewhere between a friend and an obsession. He trembles as he watches the boxer attempt to force himself into the version of masculinity everyone expects from a real man. Sadly, that storyline goes nowhere hopeful, since the boxer nearly loses his life because of…

At its core, this documentary is about the American religious right's aggressive opposition to the LGBTQ community and the harm that causes families caught between their faith and the love they feel for their own children. The film takes a gentle, patient approach, clearly hoping to convince people with conservative religious beliefs that there is no reason to be fighting the LGBTQ community. It keeps its attention on parents: how they responded when their children came out, what the families endured, and how they eventually reached a point where they could offer support.The film begins with the Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage and the backlash that followed across much of the country, though that is not really its central concern. Its real focus is four families. The first is an evangelical family in Washington state whose entire world is shaken when one of their sons comes out as gay. The parents speak very openly about putting him through conversion therapy, and about how badly he struggled internally, eventually developing serious drug problems and dying. Two more stories involve transgender children, one boy and one girl, and both are especially compelling because prejudice against trans people is so much more intense considering how small that community is. You can also see that things are gradually changing, since one of the people featured is Sarah McBride, who became the first trans person ever to speak at a national political convention when she addressed the 2016 Democratic convention. The fourth story follows a gay Puerto Rican immigrant whose grandmother rejected him, though…

Honestly, they should’ve just named this show J&J. The two leads are Jerome and Jinn, and the show itself even calls them by that nickname a few times. Maybe there were title issues, but J&J would’ve suited it so much better. Head 2 Head just sounds a little off. Anyway, it begins like a pretty standard enemies to lovers story, but give it a little time and there’s more happening under the surface. It’s 12 episodes, around 45 minutes each, and overall it’s a decent watch.Jerome and Jinn have lived across from each other since childhood, and they’ve been rivals for just as long. They tease each other, talk each other down, and basically disagree about everything. Even so, they’re in the same friend group, along with Van and Farm. Jerome gets hurt after a car race and begins having visions. He soon realizes they’re always tied to Jinn and the world around him—sometimes comforting, sometimes seriously unsettling. Since he’s injured, both sets of parents decide Jerome should recover at Jinn’s university condo. While he’s busy worrying about Jinn, Jerome starts catching real feelings, and eventually they begin dating. But the visions don’t stop. They show Jinn arguing with his mother, being in an accident and maybe dying, and also the two of them growing apart, though other times they become boyfriends. Jerome gradually shares some of what he’s seen with Jinn, and together they try to change the future by having Jerome stay close, support him, and love him. Alongside that is Van and Farm’s love story. Van is…

This is an early-90s film, and that context genuinely matters when you watch it. It was probably fairly talked about in its day. It's a murder mystery erotic thriller that's somehow both dramatic and utterly ridiculous, and the sheer absurdity actually made me laugh a few times before I had to remind myself that logic clearly wasn't much of a concern for filmmakers back then. David, the central character, is deeply messed up and genuinely cruel, yet you still feel sorry for him because he's obviously a victim of sexual abuse who never processed any of it and instead inflicts that pain on everyone around him in the most horrible ways possible.The movie starts with the brutal murder of a naked man. We then meet David, a young man who has just left boarding school after a teacher dies, almost certainly the murder we have just seen. He arrives at his wealthy mother's beautiful oceanfront home to spend time with her and her boyfriend, Paul. They both keep trying to push David into socializing, meeting girls, and making friends, but he has no interest in any of it. Paul quickly realizes David is gay, whereas his mother simply refuses to acknowledge it. David begins spending time with a pair of hippie guys, already making both his mother and Paul uneasy, and when they start asking him for money and taunting him over his denial of his sexuality, he pushes them to their deaths. Paul becomes convinced that David is responsible, while the mother remains entirely oblivious. David later befriends Tony…