Gay Kiss Montage

Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck gay kiss in In & Out.

Following my Valentine’s Day post featuring lots of male-female kisses and embraces (and a few shapely legs, bare breasts, and sensuous lips, courtesy of, respectively, Silvana Mangano, Clara Calamai, and Jane Russell), here’s the gay/lesbian version. This Gay Kiss Montage post was originally published in June 2007, when Turner Classic Movies ran a couple of dozen films featuring gay/lesbian/bi/etc. characters as part of their “movies with gay characters” series.

Created in late 2006 by Robert Eldredge, the video was inspired by the finale of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winner Cinema Paradiso, in which Jacques Perrin watches clips – kisses, hugs, embraces, nudity, sensuality, expressions of human desire – that, decades earlier, had been cut from the films screened at his Italian village’s old movie house. The local Catholic priest had found those bits of celluloid harmful to the town’s morals and family values.

Eldredge has kept Ennio Morricone’s sublime music in his montage, which features kisses and embraces that would have given the aforementioned priest a coronary. Now, it’s worth noting that even without the direct input from sex-obsessed religious figures, the expressions of human sensuality and tenderness seen in the clip below (please scroll down) remain very much a taboo in the vast majority of mainstream movies.

Curiously, YouTube requires that you log in to watch this video clip, as it’s considered potentially inappropriate. (“This content may contain material flagged by YouTube’s user community that may be inappropriate for some users. To view this video please verify you are 18 or older by signing in or signing up.”) I’ve found no such warning when attempting to watch montages featuring heterosexual movie kisses.

Though posted after the release of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Eldredge’s Gay Kiss Montage features no clips showing Heath Ledger kissing Jake Gyllenhaal. But you’ll find plenty of other (mostly) lesser-known kissing scenes. Here’s the list of films, as per Eldredge (I added the names of a few actors/directors):

1. Boys Briefs 1 or 2
2. ?
3. Christina Cox, Karyn Dwyer in Anne Wheeler’s Better Than Chocolate
4. Boys briefs 1 or 2
5. Joey Lauren Adams and Carmen Llywelyn/Carmen Lee in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy
6. Angelo Bell’s Broken Hearts Club
7. Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen in Charles Herman-Wurmfeld’s Kissing Jessica Stein
8. Scott Neal, Glen Berry in Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing
9. ?
10. Sébastien Lifshitz’s Presque rien / Come Undone
11. Don Roos’ The Opposite of Sex
12. Boys Briefs 1 or 2
13. ?
14. Better Than Chocolate
15. Rose Troche’s Bedrooms and Hallways
16. Broken Hearts Club
17. Tommy O’Haver’s Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss
18. Come Undone
19. Robert Lee King’s Psycho Beach Party
20. Joe Mantello’s Love! Valour! Compassion!
21. Better Than Chocolate
22. ?
23. Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss
24. Love! Valour! Compassion!
25. ?
26. Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck in Frank Oz’s In & Out
27. Julianne Moore and Toni Collette in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours
28. Boys Briefs 1 or 2
29. Broken Hearts Club
30. Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia

(Sorry, the video has been removed from the source.)