I heard there was some gay stuff in Alexander but I didn’t see it.
I’m not too surprised by this, since the movie was directed by Joel Schumacher, who also directed Batman & Robin, and who is, I think, openly gay.
Ben Hur
I know, I know. Gay subtext in a Charlton Heston movie? Watch the scene where Ben Hur greets Messala. William Wyler, the director, was gay. He told Stephen Boyd to play the scene as if Messala and Ben Hur were long lost lovers, but not to tell Heston. 
You know Ben Hur was in the OP. Right?
Fried Green Tomatoes, if we’re not limiting ourselves to boys. But I’m sure everyone knows that one.
Oy. It has not been my day here. I do love telling that story though…
About 29 minutes into the 1948 “Red River” when John Ireland’s cowpoke character says to Montgomery Clift’s character, Mathew Garth,
“Good looking gun you were about to use back there. CAN I SEE IT?”
Monty, who was gay, smirks and rubs his nose, and whips it out.
John says, " MAYBE YOU’D LIKE TO SEE MINE!" and whips his out and says, “NICE, AWFUL NICE! You know, there are only two things better than a good gun - a Swiss watch and a woman from anywhere. Have you ever had a good Swiss watch?”
Monty smirking all the while, says nothing, lest, perhaps, he would crack up.
James Arness did the same dialogue in the 1988 remake (on tv yet.)
I always wondered if Shane and Jack Wilson (the Palance villain) hadn’t had a torrid affair in another town at another time. Shane at least let on like Wilson was somebody he wanted to avoid.
Let’s not even get into Shane’s thing with Joey. I bet Brandon DeWilde was toubled by that the rest of his short life.
Let’s digress into the books for a second. Why people keep going on about Frodo and Sam (Sam marries a woman when they come back, people!) and completely miss Legolas and Gimli is beyond me. They fight together, they become friends and everything, and what do they do after the war is over? They travel across the world together, they take each other to see their respective parents, they walk through romantic caves in Rohan, they spend the rest of their lives together, and when Legolas finally leaves for Valinor he takes Gimli with him on the ship. What else do you need?
I don’t think Tolkien intended for there to be anything erotic in the relationship between Frodo and Sam, but even the old professor must have thought at one point or another when he wrote about Legolas and Gimli - you know, this is pretty gay.
Roy Scheider’s and William Devane’s characters in “Marathon Man.”
Who were actually lovers in the book.
Some of these examples aren’t what I’d consider subtext. Several of them strike me as “text.”
Anyways, another good example is Johnny Guitar. The whole film is one long psychosexual mess. Not only do we have Joan Crawford (who butches up every role she played at least from Mildred Pierce on) and Mercedes McCambridge sublimating for each other through most of the film, but half the men in town have the big pants for the titular Johnny. The film includes one of the gayest pick up lines ever spoken on film outside porn, John Carradine to our hero: “That’s a lot of man you’re carrying in those boots, stranger.”
And then there’s The Fountainhead, a Freudian psychodrama dressed up in Objectivist clothing. Sure there’s all that yapping about Man versus The Collective or whatever, but what’s really going on is that bitch of an architectural reviewer Ellsworth wants the big granite-busting drill that Howard’s saving for Dominique and Howard won’t give it to him so he sets out to destroy him in a jealous snit. And then there’s Dominique’s girly husband Gail who also wants Howard.
The Maltese Falcon[ (John Huston version), though the implications are pretty clear. There’s a lot of knowing looks as Spade looks at Joel Cairo’s card. And, of course, Spade refers to Wilmer as “your gunsel” to Guttman. As I often point out here, “gunsel” at the time meant a young homosexual who has a relationship for an older man.
Also not subtle nowadays, was Cary Grant’s line in Bringing Up Baby, where, when asked why he’s wearing Katherine Hepburn’s dressing gown, he says, “Because I suddenly went gay all of a sudden.” This particular usage of “gay” was unknown to the general public at the time. Later, when asked pretty much the same question, he said, “I’m just waiting for a but on 42nd Street,” which referenced the fact that 42nd Street in NYC was a notorious gay cruising spot in the 20s, and, when the police tried to crack down, people would say they were just waiting for a bus. That also was little known to the general public at the time (and now, too).
More subtle is the line in one of the Fred Astaire movies, where Edward Everett Horton (who was gay) says, “I’m doing great with the ladies,” and Astaire replies, totally incredulously, “You!!!”
In Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, there’s more than a little homosexual subtext in the way Bruno stalks Guy (especially in the tennis match audience shot).
Alien
This film makes ample use of the fear of non-coital sex. The character played by John Hurt, Kane, is attacked by the creature which, unknown to him and the rest of the crew, impregnates him by way of oral sex. Then he dies during the unnatural childbirth.
The issue of this homosexual birth then goes about killing all of the crew except the woman, Ripley, and her “cat.”
Since this movie came out in 1979, I always thought it was a great foreshadowing of the AIDS epidemic and I’ve wondered if perhaps there were rumors rumbling within the gay community that everything was not alright which the writers expressed in the screenplay.
I don’t think the writers of Alien were smart enough.
I just looked over the quotes for Strangers on a Train and there’s this:
This after Bruno killed Guy’s wife. :dubious:
Re: Top Gun. C’mon, any film with Tom Cruise is easy to pick through for gay subtext. It gets really creepy with Jerry Maguire though.
Even IMDb gets into it:
“He was the receiver - he loved going deep to catch a pass.”
I guess that line’s from the Freudian script.
Is there any way we can find a gay subtext in a Mel Gibson film? You know, just to piss him off?
Have you even seen Mad Max? All those guys in leather suits showing their asses, delivering lines like “be still, my dog of war” and going berserk when their boyfriends die?
Thought of another one. The vampire film Fright Night. The main character was a teenage boy who believed (correctly as it turned out) that his new neighbor, Jerry Dandrige, was a vampire. The best friend of the main character is named Evil Ed and in one scene the vampire has been cornered in an alley by the vampire Jerry Dandrige.
Jerry Dandrige embraces Evil Ed in his cape. Obviously, he recognizes that Evil Ed is getting crap at school for being gay. (Interestingly, the actor who played Evil Ed, Stephen Geoffreys, went on to a long career acting in gay porn.)
Perhaps, as Otto suggested, this was text (i.e., not implied but explicit).
Oh please, Passion of the Christ, with its extended sado-homo-erotic whipping scenes?
But seriously folks…
The Man Without a Face IIRC had in its source material gay content which Gibson excised for the film version. Not that I would know from personal experience, as I loathe Mel Gibson and won’t put another buck in his pocket by paying to see one of his cinematic abortions.
Never saw it–does it have Judas kissing Jesus?