gay in spirit

Films that read as queer, though none has an openly gay character at its centre. Six hang on a bond between two men, and one of those men is an alien. Two hang on a bond between women. The last two turn on no same-sex bond: The Babadook was placed in Netflix's LGBT category, and one of the directors of The Matrix has given it a reading of her own.

Start with the men. In Top Gun, Maverick is accepted into Miramar's fighter school and has to compete with Iceman, a fellow student. Reviewing it in 1986, the critic Pauline Kael called it "a shiny homoerotic commercial", and in the 1994 film Sleep with Me, Quentin Tarantino's character delivers a monologue arguing that Top Gun is a gay love story. Challengers makes the rival an old friend: Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, is married to a champion on a losing streak who must face Patrick, his former best friend and her former boyfriend. PinkNews quoted Josh O'Connor, who plays Patrick, on the three leads: "I think they all kind of love each other and they're figuring that out." In RRR the rivalry starts as a hunt: Raju, an Indian cop in the British army, has promised to bring in the tribal revolutionary Bheem, dead or alive. Then the two risk their lives to save a child after a train accident and become best friends. When the film reached Western audiences in 2022, ANI reported, many viewers tweeted that it was a gay romance. In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King the friendship is a given: Frodo and his loyal friend Sam reach Mordor on the quest to destroy the One Ring. Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, has said he suggested the moment in The Fellowship of the Ring where Sam takes Frodo's hand, because he worried two straight actors might miss what gay viewers see in a touch. In Venom the other half of the pair is an alien: Eddie Brock, an investigative journalist attempting a comeback after a scandal, accidentally becomes the host of Venom, an alien symbiote. The critic Leigh Monson wrote in Birth.Movies.Death in 2020 that the film, "intentionally or not, plays like a romantic comedy budding between Eddie and Venom." The director of Saltburn goes furthest. Oliver Quick is struggling to find his place at Oxford until Felix Catton, an aristocrat, invites him to spend a summer at his family's estate, and Emerald Fennell told Attitude the film is "undeniably about same-sex desire".

The women's bonds are the other two. In Showgirls, Nomi Malone arrives in Las Vegas to make a name as a dancer, feels a love/hate pull toward the headliner Cristal Connors, and wants to become her. Jeffrey McHale, who made the documentary You Don't Nomi, credits the queer community with keeping the film alive after critics panned it. In Jennifer's Body, a cheerleader is possessed by a demon and her best friend has to stop her. Its screenwriter Diablo Cody has called the friendship "pretty obviously a queer relationship".

The last two turn on no same-sex bond. Amelia, a widowed mother, and her son Samuel read a book about a monster that hides in the dark corners of their house in The Babadook. The film was placed in Netflix's LGBT category, and its monster was adopted as a gay icon. In The Matrix, Thomas Anderson lives two lives, a programmer by day and a hacker called Neo by night. Lilly Wachowski, who made the film with her sister Lana, said in 2020 that a trans story was the sisters' original intention.

You are not obliged to agree with any of these readings.