Still, making lists is a contribution to understanding what’s important to us, and the beginning of contextualizing and evaluating them, and so I think it’s worth doing. How can we know those films are great if we’ve only seen them once, or even twice, and if their memories are less than a year-old in our minds? Maybe others can figure things out that fast, but I can’t.
That’s one reason why I don’t put much stock in ranked year-end lists, and especially not in Oscar nominations, which are primarily about career politics in Hollywood. I’ve lived with those older films for much longer.
It’s not that there have been no good gay-themed movies released since 2000, it’s that greatness for me is a function of time and an accumulation of experiences, not just of seeing films, but of thinking, writing, and talking about them. Looking over my GTM list on Letterboxd, I realize that the bulk of the films that resonate strongly in my mind and therefore received the highest star ratings or at least the most confident ones, were, in fact, released before 2000. All of these films are available for streaming and download for members only.
