The sword and sandals epic Immortals, starring hunky Brit Henry Cavill—who will play Superman in next year’s Man of Steel—is another in a long line of films with homoerotic vibes, filled with bronzed, buff, shirtless warriors doing battle with one another in eye-popping 3-D. From Top Gun and its infamous volleyball scene to muscly gearheads checking out what’s under each other’s “hoods” in The Fast and the Furious, see our list of the most unintentionally homoerotic movies ever.
Jan Thijs / War of the Gods
This CGI and slow-mo heavy sword-and-sandals film centers on King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), who leads 300 Spartan men into battle against more than a million Persian soldiers. Despite all the blood and guts spilled, the film is mainly an epic orgy of bronze-bodied, buff, shirtless men acting macho and watching each other’s backs, so to speak. New Yorker critic David Denby said it best: “When the Spartans, pumped like linebackers leaving the weight room, go out to fight, they wear nothing but leather codpieces and red capes; they die clutching one another’s hands. The Persians go one better. Their king, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), an epicene seven-footer with a shaved head and what looks like a gold-lamé thong, lounges on cushions in his court … the movie is a porno-military curiosity—a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film.” The movie has been endlessly mocked for its homoeroticism, even spawning an awful parody film, Meet the Spartans. Butler also poked fun at the movie during an appearance on Saturday Night Live, starring in a gay Spartans sketch.
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This 2001 action film is basically a rehash of Point Break, centering on an FBI agent (Paul Walker) who infiltrates a tight-knit gang of car enthusiasts who engage in highway robberies. It’s also, as it happens, very, very homoerotic. “This movie is all about what’s under the hood, bro,” wrote The Washington Post’s reviewer. “More to the point—pop-psychology-wise—it’s about guys looking under each other’s hoods. There’s nothing in this world like impressing another dude with your fuel injector. This is macho bonding at 9,000 revs.” And how’s this for homoerotic subtext: in one of the film’s deleted scenes, the gang is all sprawled out on top of a car—greasy and shirtless—sharing stories about their first car experience. “The first time I drove was with my learner’s permit … the car in front of me locks up its brakes,” says Walker’s character. “Someone blew into me from behind. Five-car pileup.”
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Vampirism is surely a metaphor for homosexuality on HBO’s True Blood, but Neil Jordan’s 1994 feature is the king of homoerotic vampire stories. The film centers on Louis (Brad Pitt), a Louisiana man in the late 1700s who is suicidal after the loss of his wife and infant child. The vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise) then promises he’ll be “reborn,” seducing him and transforming him into a vampire. When Louis, who loathes the blood-sucking vampire lifestyle, expresses his desire to leave Lestat, he transforms a young girl named Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) into their vampire “daughter” in order to keep him around. Later, in 1870s Paris, Louis comes across two (very gay) vampires, Santiago (Stephen Rea) and Armand (Antonio Banderas), the latter wanting Louis to ditch Claudia, join his lair, and be the man by his side.
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Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), this 1991 cult action film is most notable for its epic bromance between Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), a former Rose Bowl quarterback-cum-undercover FBI agent, and Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), the surfer-dude leader of a group of bank robbers. Bodhi teaches Johnny to surf, and Johnny gradually buys in to Bodhi’s surfer-dude philosophizing. It’s all very gay. When Johnny finds out that Bodhi is indeed the man he’s after, Bodhi tries to recruit Johnny to his gang in a scene ripe with homoerotic subtext. “All I’m asking for is 90 seconds of your life Johnny, that’s it," says Bodhi. "See, it’s basic dog psychology: if you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit. And if you project weakness, you draw aggression. That’s how people get hurt. See, fear causes hesitation, and hesitation causes your worst fears to come true. So it’s simple: you project strength to avoid conflict." He then hands a gun to Johnny and says, "Can't have you walking through those doors with your dick in your hand, right?" “I can’t do this," replies Johnny, but Bodhi doesn’t take no for an answer, saying, “Sure you can! Who knows? You might like it.”
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Things are pretty homoerotic from the first moment Maj. Dutch Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) arrives in Guatemala and greets his old military pal George Dillon (Carl Weathers). He screams, “Dillon!” like an excited schoolboy before approaching him and delivering one of the most epic, muscle-bound handshakes ever. The two then form a testosterone-heavy team of buff guys for an elite rescue mission, but things go awry when the men are killed one by one by a predatory alien. Later in the film, Billy Sole rips his shirt off and screams, drawing blood from his chest with a knife. Many critical readings of Predator have posited that the little-seen alien hunting down and killing the film’s many men is a veiled metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, and the relationship between Dutch and Dillon is very similar to that of ex-lovers.
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More homoerotic vampires, but this time, in Joel Schumacher’s 1987 cult classic, they’re of the teenage variety. Michael Emerson (Jason Patric) and his younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) move into a small California town. Michael seems like your average guy until he’s seduced into joining a clique of vampires, led by David (Kiefer Sutherland), who feed on the townspeople, dress in leather, and sport outrageous haircuts (see: David’s mullet). After Michael becomes a vampire, he starts dressing differently—sporting a leather jacket, what appears to be makeup, and an earring—and his new lifestyle is the source of great friction within his family, in particular with his younger brother, Sam.
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Generally regarded as the Citizen Kane of homoerotic cinema, Tony Scott’s Tom Cruise–starrer has been endlessly parodied for its homosexual subtext—from the “I’ll be your wingman anytime” lines to the infamous, oiled-up volleyball scene. Quentin Tarantino was the first to really blow the lid off Top Gun for its heavy gay subtext in his cameo in the 1994 film Sleep With Me. “It is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality … You’ve got Maverick, all right? He’s on the edge, man. He’s right on the fucking line, all right? And you’ve got Iceman and all his crew. They’re gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they’re saying, go, go the gay way, go the go way. He could go both ways …”
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Predator wasn’t Carl Weathers’s first homoerotic film. The third film in the Rocky boxing movie franchise, Rocky III, featured Rocky’s heavyweight bout against Clubber Lang, a brash, arrogant boxer played by Mr. T. After Rocky gets knocked out by Lang, Rocky’s ex-nemesis Apollo Creed (Weathers) offers to help train Rocky in exchange for “a big favor.” The two then proceed to frolic on the beach together and race each other, doing sprints in the sand. When Rocky finally beats Apollo in a race, the two jump around in the waves together like giddy school kids and hug each other strenuously, like something out of an erectile dysfunction commercial. And the big favor? A private rematch between the two fighters in a closed gym. Ding ding!
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There’s a reason why Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus is Christian’s favorite film in Clueless, and it’s not just because he has, in the words of Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, “a thing for Tony Curtis.” This sword-and-sandals epic about a slave revolt in the ancient Roman province of Libya contains a major homoerotic subtext between the tyrannical Roman general Crassus, played by Sir Laurence Olivier, and his slave, Antoninus (Tony Curtis). Crassus, while bathing, makes some homosexual allusions to Antoninus, causing him to flee and join Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) in his uprising. The scene in question was initially even more homoerotic than it appeared in the film, according to Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet, including remarks about liking both oysters and snails. The dialogue was removed from the film because of the Hays Code.
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When filmmaker Howard Hawks was questioned about the gay undertones in his classic 1948 Western Red River, he famously responded it was “a goddamn silly statement to make.” Nevertheless, many film writers view Hawks’s film as the original gay Western—a genre that’s often viewed as intensely homoerotic, culminating with Brokeback Mountain, which lifted the covers off of the genre’s veiled gay subtext. When we’re first introduced to a grown-up Matthew Garth, played by the gay actor Montgomery Clift, he appears to be fellating a piece of straw while staring longingly at the crotch of Thomas Dunson (John Wayne), his adopted caretaker. Women are almost nonexistent in the film, and there’s a pretty overt gun reference after the two intimately share a cigarette and Dunson exposes a bracelet in Garth’s hand. And the two ranchers’ fight toward the end comes off as a lover’s quarrel more than anything, considering the amount of sexual tension that’s been building in the film.
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