To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.
“I can’t remember,” Matthew Lopez tells me. “I genuinely cannot remember… Does Interview With a Vampire count?”
I’m talking to Lopez via Zoom about the first gay sex scene he ever saw onscreen. And the usually articulate, quip-ready director and playwright seems absolutely stumped. It takes a few minutes and some back and forth before the answer eventually comes to him: it was Bound, the Wachowskis’ sapphic neo-noir debut, which came out in 1996.
That year, Lopez was a 19-year-old college student. “That’s pretty old, for being able to see [something like] that,” he says.
Lopez, born at “the tail end of Gen X,” came of age in a time when gay representation in major Hollywood films was making great strides—in films like Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia and Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation—but in a way that still felt limited by the morés of the time. Most of those films may have had characters who identified themselves as queer, but the viewers rarely saw those characters actually engage in intimate acts. The message Hollywood was sending seemed to be clear: It’s okay to be gay, as long as you keep the actual love—and the actual fucking—offscreen.
“Philadelphia was tame, and was criticized for that,” says the veteran screenwriter, producer and director Ron Nyswaner, who was nominated for an Oscar for that film’s screenplay. “There wasn't enough physical affection between the two main characters. Believe me, nothing would've made me happier than to write sexy scenes with Antonio Banderas.”
The Oscar-winning Philadelphia was still a milestone film in terms of gay representation in Hollywood. But Nyswaner, who has been working in Hollywood since the early ‘80s, recalls what could’ve been: “There was actually a moment with them lying in bed and holding each other that was cut,” he says. “I regretted that that was cut. They were made because people decided a scene isn't moving a story forward. I wish I had argued for it harder because sometimes not every scene has to move a story forward. It would've been a little bit more groundbreaking, in a way.”
Today, viewers are lucky enough to have a buffet of portrayals of queer intimacy onscreen—and they’ve never been more authentic, logistically realistic, or hotter. And while this movement has been slowly building for decades, 2023 was noticeably a sort of banner year for gay male sex onscreen.
Earlier this year, the great independent filmmaker Ira Sachs premiered his film Passages at Sundance to ecstatic reviews—and breathless conversation around the scene in the film where Ben Whishaw skillfully tops Franz Rogowski. In the summer came the streaming blockbuster Red, White & Royal Blue, which set off all kinds of discourse—from straight people—around gay sex positions. By the time fall hit and the studios were ramping up to awards season, gay sex was suddenly everywhere: There was Bradley Cooper playing bongos on Matt Bomer’s bottom in Maestro. There was Paul Mescal licking cum off Andrew Scott on All of Us Strangers. There was Barry Keoghan guzzling Jacob Elordi’s juice in Saltburn. And on TV, there was Jonathan Bailey enthusiastically sucking on Matt Bomer’s toes in Fellow Travelers, a series Nyswaner wrote, produced and created.
“It may seem, not necessarily incorrectly, that, at the time of publishing, we are—especially in the western world—living in an unprecedented time for LGBTQIA+ representation in film and media,” Kyle Turner writes in the introduction to The Queer Film Guide, a compendium of 100 movies that tell LGBTQIA+ stories released earlier this year. “But those depictions of queerness didn’t spring up from nowhere—they have roots, origins, starting places, blueprints, and planted seeds.”
This phenomenon has allowed for queer creators like Nyswaner, who have been at the forefront of the movement for decades, to have a full circle moment with their past work. In Fellow Travelers, for example, Nyswaner is not only able to give the groundbreaking Philadelphia historical context through a big-budget limited series— he’s also able to fill in the blanks of intimacy that were missing in that film.
“I don't necessarily know that it began in 2023, but it certainly feels like it had an exclamation point of a year with 2023,” says Evan Ross Katz, a writer who has inadvertently become a key documentarian of this phenomenon on social media. On his popular Instagram account, Katz has been known to turn some of these scenes into memes, drawing out the outrageousness of certain moments and freezing them for prosperity.
One of Katz’s most-memed movies this year was Lopez’s Red, White & Royal Blue, an adaptation of the bestselling novel about a love affair between a British prince and the son of the US president. With that built-in audience, Red, White & Royal Blue expectedly became a streaming sensation when it hit Amazon Prime in the summer. What was unexpected was how a relatively chaste sex scene in which the pair have missionary sex became the focus of Twitter discourse around the project. (“Gay guys can do missionary?” one Twitter user asked.)
Shot like a sex scene from a late ‘80s/early ‘90s rom-com—think When Harry Met Sally, Broadcast News, or Moonstruck—the scene in Red, White & Royal Blue, while mostly tame and almost wholesome, is nonetheless a sneakily subversive moment. Right before the pair hit the sack, they negotiate the logistics of gay sex (“Who does what?” the American asks the Brit) and when they do the deed, the film allows their expressions to take viewers through the moment. In a way, it queers a cinematic trope mostly denied to queer characters in mainstream rom-coms. “You could call it sort of making up for lost time,” Lopez says.
It’s glossy the way big-budget rom-coms are, but it’s also instructional—Lopez and the film’s intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt plotted out the scene with that in mind. “I wanted to focus on delivering a moment that anyone who has been in either of their places understands implicitly what's going on,” Lopez says. “That was very intentional. I find there's something very romantic about honest depictions of sex.
“Look, if someone came to me and was like, ‘What's the first thing you need to know if you're bottoming?’ It’s like, breathe. Just breathe. Breath is very important,” Lopez says, laughing. “What else is also important? Consent at the moment of insertion. That moment where, ‘Do I go in more? Do you need me to stop?’ [In the scene] they are communicating with their eyes. All of that is something I've experienced in both topping and bottoming and it's an experience that other people have experienced in topping and bottoming.”
“Film throughout time has had an important role in educating people about the ways in which people like themselves and unlike themselves operate in the world—gay sex being a part of how many people operate,” Katz tells me. “I did think it was somewhat charming that people were watching this movie from an anthropological perspective and being like, ‘Oh, this is unlocking something I didn't know about the gay experience.’”
“It's interesting because for so long, the idea of gay sex was so aberrant and vulgar and gross and whatnot,” says Turner. He observes that the portrayal of gay intimacy has now become “a new feature or a new shiny aspect” of these films and TV shows. In the streaming age it seems, gay sex scenes have gone beyond simply being a way to tell queer stories, for better or worse—they’ve also become canny marketing opportunities.
Lopez maintains that the studio was always supportive in terms of doing the Red, White & Royal Blue film the right way, but adds: “I think that if they knew that that scene was going to be so talked about, so widely praised, I think whatever nerves there may have been on the part of the studio as we went into the release, that [would’ve] vanished,” he says. “I don't necessarily think it means that they or any other studio are hungry for lots of gay sex. I do think what it means is that on my next film that requires it—or for another filmmaker making it—there will a lot less of a to-do [from them] over the scene.”
Fellow Travelers was another beneficiary of the virality a steamy gay sex scene can generate. When the series first premiered in October, much of the conversation around it centered on the fantastically kinky dom-sub scenes between the show’s leading men, Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. Since then, it’s been celebrated for the breadth of its storytelling and has been roundly recognized as one of the best shows of the year.
“Dante Di Loreto, who is the head of Fremantle, the studio, said, ‘Let's make the sex scenes so hot that straight men watching them will want to have gay sex.’ That hasn't happened yet,” Nyswaner says, laughing. “I wouldn't mind it if it did.”
It’s a long way from the resistance Nyswaner encountered early in his career. He recalls an incident in 1980, studying film at Columbia, in which he was reprimanded for proposing a script with queer content. “I had submitted an assignment using a couple of gay characters, literally just talking about the desire that one man had for another man,” Nyswaner says. “And [this professor] was really upset by that and he called me into his office and everything. He literally suggested maybe I shouldn't be a screenwriter.”
Nyswaner has been working in Hollywood since the early ‘80s and has seen the fight for representation ebb and flow. In the mid ‘80s, then president of production for Fox, Scott Rudin, reached out to him and asked, "What would you think about writing a script about a gay teenager?"
“It was in the era of the John Hughes movies like Pretty in Pink,” Nyswaner says. He pitched a script about a gay teenager called The Pink Boy. “He had a braid of hair that was dyed pink, and he wore pink Converse high tops, called Converse All Stars,” he says. The studio purchased the script but later decided not to move forward with it.
A few years later, in 1990, he found himself pitching another gay script—this time, it was with Jonathan Demme, and it was for the concept that would become Philadelphia. As Nyswaner remembers it, the producer Marc Platt, who was with Orion Pictures then before moving to TriStar, told them: “I know maybe 10 projects in development right now about AIDS. They all have heterosexual main characters, like people who have gone through blood transfusions, et cetera, et cetera.” Nyswaner recalls him saying. “That's immoral. We are going to make the movie about AIDS that should be made.’”
Later, they were summoned to the office of TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy under the guise of additional notes. “I’m probably going to choke up when I tell you this,” Nyswaner tells me. “He said, ‘I go to Palm Springs two or three times a month. There's a sculptor there, I've been collecting his work. He's a genius and he's dying. The world is going to lose a great human being and a great artist—that's wrong.” Nyswaner catches his breath. “And your movie has to tell the world that that's wrong. That's your note. Get out of my office.’”
Reflecting on the decades he’s worked in Hollywood, Nyswaner says, “There are waves within our business, and you kind of have to catch the wave. We caught the wave. There were people in power who were saying it's time to make a movie with a homosexual main character who's not a murderer, does not have really bad psychological problems. They were ready to embrace it.”
When Ira Sachs’ endlessly stylish, emotionally brutal film Passages was released in North America last summer, it was slapped with an NC-17 rating by the MPA—a move which Sachs has called “a form of cultural censorship,” citing the board’s track record of stigmatizing queer sex onscreen.
After all, there are no scenes of full frontal nudity, physical violence or intense drug use in Passages. Instead, that rating seems to hinge on one almost two-and-a-half minute scene where the estranged couple Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw) reunite in the sack, and we see the previously subservient Martin take control of the domineering Tomas in bed. As one Twitter user has noted, the film somehow manages to use “power bottoming like a plot twist.”
In the scene, Tomas is seen playing with Martin’s asshole as he’s getting penetrated. It’s the kind of erotic detail so rarely seen in the movies—shocking in its realism but also emotionally revealing, even beautiful. “I don't write the details,” Sachs tells me. “The details are improvised by the actors. All the scenes in my films, the text is written and the actions and the emotions are discovered. So I'm not rehearsing a scene like that… It would've been a very different scene if it was choreographed.”
The scene also, for a brief second, boasts a close up of Whishaw’s ass crack—especially daring for an actor many people know best for roles in blockbusters like Paddington and Daniel Craig’s James Bond films. “He was comfortable taking his pants off and revealing his body,” Sachs says.
Whishaw identifies as gay, and Sachs believes that was part of what made their collaboration so compelling. “I actually think working with gay actors gives me, as a director, a certain kind of freedom and a certain kind of trust and familiarity that's not insignificant,” he says. (Up next, Sachs and Whishaw are working together on a film on the late great gay photographer Peter Hujar.)
I’m enjoying talking to Sachs, who is on the Zoom call from the Manhattan apartment he shares with his husband, the artist Boris Torres, and their children, and has alternated between answering my questions with giving me a tour of their space. But in the middle of our interview, he tells me: “I have to say, you’re describing a narrative in which there's been progress. And I can also describe a narrative where there's been regression, in terms of what is possible and what is permitted and what we allow ourselves as filmmakers.”
Sachs warns against accepting a narrative where the battle has already been won, where queer stories onscreen have already been widely embraced. “Look at the gay filmmakers of our generation and tell me the last time they made gay films with gay content,” he says. “And why do you think that is? That's because they actually need to sustain economic careers.”
“I do think that there's a naivete, to say, ‘Look where we've come,’” he says. “Because I just think, where's Pasolini? Where's Chantal Akerman? Where is Derek Jarman? Where are the gay filmmakers who are able to make 8, 10, 12, 15 films that are from their own lives?”
Sachs has been making films since 1997, when he premiered his directorial debut The Delta, a Memphis-set queer coming-of-age story, at Sundance. And he’s been one of the leading gay filmmakers of his time—certainly by the time his deeply personal Keep the Lights On was released to wide acclaim in 2014. But Passages is Sachs’ first explicitly gay film in nine years. And looking at other leading directors of contemporary queer cinema, you see a similar trend. For example, the British filmmaker Andrew Haigh, whose 2011 film Weekend is often acknowledged as a crucial film in this lineage, is only now making another personal, explicitly gay film with the buzzy All of Us Strangers, 12 years after Weekend.
“It's always been difficult to tell personal specific stories about marginalized communities,” Sachs says. “So we're just on a long list of people who have to fight for whatever space we can find.”