My Favorite Films for Pride Month 2024

It has been a tough number of weeks for me recently so I need to nurse my sanity and forgive how late
this monthly roundup is. I feel lucky to have seen 30 films for my celebration of the Pride Month this
year. Yes, thirty and that would mean one film per day was the target.

Hence, in chronological order, here are my ten favorite films, queer pieces which for me offer something
beyond your usual patronizing identity politics and confound with the dialectical forces of transgression
and seduction:

1. Teorema (1968). I remember hearing this film after reading a review mentioning how this Dutch film
titled Borgman is compared to this Pasolini work. The intersection lies on the arrival of an ethereal
stranger. While the former is focused on a company of mysterious vagabonds corrupting and soon
massacring an upper-class family, the latter centers on a handsome visitor seducing all members of
another wealthy household and abruptly leaving them with their own epiphanies. Our queer politicking
is relegated on the backseat for one of the most transcendental masterpieces out there. But one can
even argue that the queerness here of the enigmatic spiritual guide is meant to destabilize and elude
categorizations like a holy mystery.

2. Alucarda (1977). The sapphic subtext is clear: two young girls find themselves at odds with the
convent after their pact with the devil. The film surpasses its low-budget production (which nonetheless
works and offers fleeting moments of astonishment) to pack a lot of themes like the notable clash of
religion and science and eventually the policing of the female bodies (one strong case here being the
bondage-like tunics of the nuns) by the Catholic Church, further suggesting in one transgressive and
hauntingly beautiful contrapuntal juxtaposition how the satanic is even more emancipatory vis-à-vis the
Catholic.

3. Taxi zum Klo (1980). I watched this film on a porn site due to its explicit and unsimulated sex scenes.
Probably one of the most daring and honest works I have ever seen, Frank Ripploh’s cinematic
autobiography is easily one of my favorites for the month (or this year) as it endears itself to me through
a character—a teacher—who in a Goffmanisque fashion strives hard to manage their public persona as a
professional and their private life as a sexually active being. Also situated on the peripheries of the film
are its episodes on sexual health and sexual partnership which are enriched by its introspections to
compose a cohesive glimpse on a specific yet relatable gay life.

4. Bondage Ecstasy (1989). Here is another film I have to watch on a porn site, one which is memorable
because my mother caught me this time and I needed to explain myself! As its name suggests, Bondage
Ecstasy is a pink film with a nutty premise: an abused corporate employee has these dreams where he
can turn into an insect who can enter the orifices of his enemies, possess them, and enact his vengeful
sexual fantasies. Beyond its obvious class struggle though and Kafkaesque reference are several
moments of beauty—the swordfight as both innuendo and preparation for intercourse and vice-versa
and how the dreams reawaken a sort of clarity to its protagonist; if he finally consummates his desire
with his friend then he might ultimately resist the abuses he suffers in his workplace too.

5. Paris Is Burning (1990). Despite several critiques (including bell hooks’ opprobrium on its imperialist
ethnographic approach), Paris is Burning remains a valuable primer for queer experience—represented
best by the ambivalent ball culture—as a site of struggle and manages to be intersectional as well in its
consideration of class and race as dimensions of disenfranchisement. One can even ask: where is Jennie
Livingston in the film? Only to be proceeded by another question: are the eloquence and colorful
personalities of the members of the houses not enough?

6. East Palace, West Palace (1996). One can sense that East Palace, West Palace is actually walking a
tightrope with its story of a possible romance between a gay writer arrested for cruising and a
homophobic cop. Yet the stunt is beguiling. Yes, one can complain about the stereotypical and implied
pathologizing of queerness as trauma yet the context in which it is told draws our attention to the
probable motive behind this drama. The film is imbued with transgressions everywhere: the coalescence
of pain and pleasure in the act of being interrogated, the queer dramatist upending the power structure
by turning an interrogation into their own confession, stage performance, and eventually seduction.

7. O Fantasma (2000). O Fantasma is a perplexing watch. A trash collector named Sergio roams the
streets for anonymous sex with other men and becomes fascinated with a motorcycle owner. The film
gradually takes a surreal route as the garbageman grows feral. What’s with Sergio? Or what is Sergio?
Does his libidinal urge herald a revolt as a reject of his society?

8. A Girl at My Door (2014). The second half of this Korean drama is a subject of controversy for
numerous reasons. One is the precarity of how we weigh the relationship between its two main
characters: the lesbian police officer and the fourteen-year-old girl she rescued from an abusive family.
Second is the ending where the former decides to take the latter despite the repercussions as she sees
no hope for the residents of the village who enabled the violence. Yet I find the film’s conclusion as
contrasting Polanski’s Chinatown. We ask ourselves about intervention and how it is mediated by
lawfulness and lawlessness in both extremes.

9. Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018). Akin to others who have seen this one-hour special, I am still
processing how to make sense of Hannah Gadsby’s reconfiguration of our usual stand-up comedy (and
maybe requiring for me a second viewing in the future) yet the whole act resonates with me as an arts
teacher and a queer individual. Unforgettable is Gadsby’s rehashing of what was initially a joke about a
homophobic encounter on a bus stop as a devastating truth concealed in cultural expectations.
10. And Then We Danced (2019). Of course, any film which uses dance as a connective language and
even secret abode for queer romance reminds me of Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang
Paa. And Then We Danced has a more acute placing of dance as a cinematic storytelling device within
the realms of the culture in which it takes place, here in Georgian tradition that sets the restrictive
gender expectations and is defied in that showstopper ending.