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Camp and kitsch:

The promotional tagline for Valley of the Dolls (1967): “In the Valley of the Dolls, it’s instant turn-on . . . dolls to put you to sleep at night, kick you awake in the morning, make life seem great—instant love, instant excitement, ultimate hell!” Geez—can you get any campier? Other camp extravaganzas include sword-and-sandal flicks, B-movies, Sinbad the Sailor movies, and biblical epics of any kind. The original Planet of the Apes movies were really gay, so gay that the gay characters in the comedy All Over the Guy (2001) felt the need to discuss it:

Eli: Well, you’ve got a half-naked Charlton Heston in a cage—

Tom: Where he belongs.

Eli: Plus my huge crush on Roddy McDowell, and those cute little leather outfits . . . that, my friend, is a gay pre-teen Happy Meal.

Any movie derived from a Tennessee Williams play or short story:

“Suddenly Last Summer is cinema’s gay horn of plenty, a fabulous gothic thriller and a pantheon of renowned gay artists and classic gay icons,” says Mark Adnum on his website OutRate.net, where he reviews DVDs. Even if you recall only part of the plot—Katharine Hepburn is trying to persuade Montgomery Clift to perform a lobotomy on her distraught daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, who is obviously about to spill the beans about her brother’s perverted sexuality—you know that we’re in high-strung homosexual territory. The script, by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, delivers enough camp and dysfunctionality to satisfy any gay or straight audience. And there’s plenty more where that came from—just check out Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster as campy would-be lovers with a fixation on skin drawings in The Rose Tattoo.

Anything written and directed by John Waters:

Starting out at the fringe of nowhere (i.e., Baltimore), John Waters eventually traveled into the brains of Middle America. His films with the drag queen Divine—Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester, Hairspray—celebrated the oddness of transvestite white-trash culture. His dyspeptic view of high-school culture has finally penetrated the straight world via the Broadway production of Hairspray.

High-concept romantic movies:

Consider the all-time seventies doomed romance: Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in The Way We Were. It meant so much to me in 1973, when I was just barely out of high school. I identified with Streisand’s career aspirations—to be a writer—and also with her matter-of-fact approach to sex. (In one scene she inserts her diaphragm and then climbs on top of Redford, who falls asleep while they are having sex.) And, of course, there’s that killer, schmaltzy song, warbled by Barbra herself. I hope I haven’t put it into your head just by mentioning it. The movie is popular among baby boomer gay guys simply because of Barbra’s presence. Yet I’d never checked out who wrote it. It was by the gay writer Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story. Finding that out was an “aha!” moment for me. In the movie, Streisand and Redford break up because of Hollywood black-listing—Redford can’t go along with Streisand’s extreme politics. The plot has a gay sense of alienation and a gay version of a strong woman who can’t be tamed. But once again, as with so many movies, plays, and books, I’m amazed at how Laurents, a gay man, created a template for how women should feel about doomed heterosexual romance.

And what about the gay Italian director Franco Zeffirelli? He created one of the most romantic movies of all time, the very lush Romeo and Juliet, the first modern version of the Shakespeare story in which the sexual focus of the camera was the male lover, Romeo, rather than the lovely Juliet. Jan Stu art, writing in The Advocate, said that Zeffirelli “gave Romeo and Juliet the 64-Crayola sparkle of an MGM musical.” But I think that what he really provided was an intense homoerotic view in the love scenes—the camera’s gaze rested squarely on Leonard Whiting as Romeo, with his beautiful body and face often flooding the