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Alex Davidson Updated: Weekend Few countries can rival the UK when it comes to making great and diverse gay films. This may come as a surprise from a country where male homosexuality was illegal until as recently as , and where gay marriage continues to ruffle right-wingers, swivel-eyed or otherwise.

Yet despite their often taboo nature, films with gay characters have been around since the silent era. So what key British gay films are out there?

1.5% of the UK?

And if you like Vicious millions seem to , you may get a perverse kick out of Staircase , a dreadful vehicle for Richard Burton and Rex Harrison as two ageing queens in a perpetual state of mutual- and self-loathing. Each of the recommendations included here is available to view in the UK.

This list should really be a Top 11 — the omission of Sunday Bloody Sunday , the first British film to feature a gay kiss, is borderline inexcusable. Borderline But gayest of all remains Borderline , a hotbed of sexual passions set around an interracial love triangle.

It was directed by Kenneth Macpherson , the editor of the landmark film journal Close Up — sadly, following the poor critical reviews for Borderline, he did not direct again. First a Girl In this zingy comedy, based on the German film Viktor und Viktoria , Matthews plays a woman who earns her coin pretending to be a man who masquerades as a female impersonator. Whishaw has the awkwardness, approachability, and inherent sense of goodness. Whishaw is also white, and with many of his characters, and with many a Soft Boy in general, his paleness is associated with his essential fragility.

Here, too, whiteness comes into contact with a Peter Pan syndrome: These characters are boys, not men — even if they are in their 20s — always unfit, in some way, for the adult world. But Whishaw has an interest in queer art and an intellectual energy that pushes the envelope of the type. The British Soft Boy is meant for everyone, and thus all his hard edges are sanded off; the British Soft Boy does not offend.

This, one imagines, is an incentive to write characters and cast actors that project comfort, warmth, coziness, and other words you might associate with descriptions of both antique furniture and Hobbits. In an environment that prizes those attributes, like streaming TV, the muted charm of the British Soft Boy is on the rise. He may not be enough to get you out of your house and to a theater, but when offered up at the top of your streaming queue as relaxation viewing, the British Soft Boy is far more appealing.

Vulture sincerely regrets the omission. Already a subscriber?

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