2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture. Read more from the series here.
On February 24, 2004, Republican president George W. Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. The next day, The Passion of the Christ came out in theaters, going on to earn over $80 million in its opening weekend thanks in part to vocal support from American evangelical leaders. This may not sound like a great cultural environment for a refreshingly gay year at the movies, but that’s exactly what 2004 turned out to be. From teen comedies like Mean Girls and Saved! to romances like Saving Face and Tropical Malady and beyond, an impressive slate of films with overt LGBTQ+ representation managed to sneak their way into theaters during an otherwise conservative era.
Of course, not all of us were old enough to go to the local arthouse where most independent queer movies would have been shown — and although film piracy was in its heyday during the aughties, only some people had the technical savvy and the internet speed to download a bootleg copy of D.E.B.S. (I’m not admitting to anything.) As a result, many younger millennials and Gen Z babies have since grown up to have very complicated queer and trans feelings about everything from Shrek 2 to Elastigirl’s butt, both of which debuted in 2004. We had to make do with what we had, even if that was an elaborate head canon about Peter Parker’s dual identity being a metaphor for transfeminine closeting. (OK, maybe I am telling on myself.)
But the 20 intravening years have given everyone plenty of time to sift through the mainstream releases to find the many queer gems that came out in 2004, whether we watched them at the time or not. For our 2004 Was So Gay package, I asked Them contributors both young and, ahem, slightly less young, to select our favorite LGBTQ+ movies from a milestone year in cinema history. Read about some of our fondest aughties film memories below. — Samantha Allen
Eating Out
Eating Out is one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen — and I mean that as a compliment. An over-the-top farce about a gay man who convinces his straight roommate to pretend to be gay in the hopes that they both can bed their crushes, this microbudget comedy has no real redeeming qualities… except for the fact that it’s perfect. After a single (sober) viewing, you might understand why it was initially panned upon release. (This was 2004, a time when depictions of gay men as horned-up sex maniacs wasn’t exactly welcomed.) But after your fourth viewing, you, like me, will begin to fall for its self-aware, tongue-in-cheek buffoonery. The corny one-liners and double entendres you once rolled your eyes at will instead have you laughing yourself into tears. You’ll slowly understand its cult appeal, and suddenly, you’ll find yourself acknowledging its genuine brilliance. Because how could you not? Eating Out is perfectly moronic. It’s the kind of flick you queue up when the edible you and a friend took on a whim is hitting just a tad too hard. This certified camp classic is tastelessly crass in the best way, and we should all be grateful. — Michael Cuby
Mean Girls
How many movies from 2004 have inspired a Broadway musical, a modern-day remake, countless memes, and an entire vocabulary of phrases — from “Get in, loser” to “I’m a mouse, duh!” — that are still instantly recognizable today? At the time, it might not have seemed like Mean Girls was going to change culture forever. Upon release, some critics thought it was largely indistinguishable from other aughties comedies while others, like the esteemed Roger Ebert, saw it as a standout among a “wasteland of other dumb movies about teenagers.” But the more we rewatched it, the more we noticed it was something special: From Tina Fey’s acerbic wit to Daniel Franzese and Lizzy Caplan’s compassionate portrayal of high-school outcasts, successive generations of queer viewers have found plenty of reasons to fall in love with this film. Plus, basically every male lead of the movie has since come out as gay — a storybook ending for a movie that has rightly become a landmark. — Samantha Allen
Seed of Chucky
As a franchise, Child’s Play — known more commonly as “the Chucky movies” — gets very little respect. Though the series began with straightforward (but surely tongue-in-cheek) horror films in the 1980s, the series veered into horror-comedy with 1998’s Bride of Chucky, a romp that introduced Jennifer Tilly as Chucky’s badass bride, Tiffany Valentine. What Bride began, Seed brought to bear: Chucky went full camp. Many people don’t know that the titular doll is the brainchild of out gay writer and director Don Mancini. Though we surely weren’t in the queerest of times in the early aughts, Mancini — in his directorial debut — gave us a slasher so kitsch that the opening credits replace the usual blood splatters with cum shots and a computer animation of serial killer sperm fertilizing eggs. Though Seed was critically reviled at the time, its detractors are flat-out wrong: This flick is a camp dog whistle playing at a tone only queer ears can hear. While I’m tempted to say Seed is a vibes-only film, that’s patently false. It also introduces quite a bit of lore that is still at play in the Chucky Cinematic Universe. Tilly plays both Valentine and herself and, by the film’s end, Valentine-as-Tilly, an enduring part of the CCU. — Mathew Rodriguez
Kinsey
Amid today’s moral panics over trans people and drag shows, Kinsey stands as a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Bill Condon’s biopic of U.S. sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey — creator of the “Kinsey scale” of sexual attraction, and himself subject to moral panics over his research on sexual behavior in the 1940s and ’50s — does veer into melodrama at points, and massages the less convenient edges of Kinsey’s work. Still, it’s largely accurate to real events according to biographers, and doesn’t shy away from the ways Kinsey carried his childhood trauma forward into the rest of his life. Kinsey is worth a watch for its cast alone: Liam Neeson gives a typically all-in performance as Kinsey (just wait until his big scene with Peter Sarsgaard), and it’s easy to see why Laura Linney earned an Oscar nomination for playing his wife and collaborator, Clara “Mac” McMillen. John Lithgow, meanwhile, is stunning as Kinsey’s repressive Puritan father, Tim Curry is on hand to play the polar opposite of Frank-N-Furter, and late British actress Lynn Redgrave delivers an all-timer monologue in one of the film’s final — and most tear-jerking — scenes. If top-caliber Hollywood performances about sexual liberation are what you need, look no further. — Samantha Riedel
Saving Face
A romcom? Set in New York City? Groundbreaking. Except in the case of Saving Face, it actually is. Alice Wu’s directorial and screenwriting debut remains in a league of its own, an all-too-rare cinematic depiction of two Asian women in a relationship. The movie follows Wil Pang (Michelle Krusiec), a successful surgeon in New York City who falls for dancer Vivian Shing (Lynn Chen). The only problem is that Wil is not out as a lesbian to her mother or to her community. That’s a big enough issue on its own, but it becomes even more pressing when Wil’s mother, Hwei-Lan (Joan Chen) moves in with Wil after she’s kicked out of her family home for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. From a technical standpoint, it’s certainly not a perfect movie. The last third in particular gets a little absurd. But despite and sometimes because of its flaws, Saving Face remains a fun watch throughout. It’s also a sendup of stereotypes about Asian women that still feels radical to this day, and the ending made me sob like a baby the first time I watched it. — James Factora
My Summer of Love
My Summer of Love is a weird name for a movie that seems like it might turn into a thriller. While it never fully tilts into the genre, its main characters Tamsin (played by Emily Blunt in her feature debut) and Mona (Natalie Press) are entangled in a summer romance that, despite moments of tenderness and connection, is largely defined by Tamsin’s agent-of-chaos tendencies. Sometimes she seems like a puckish prankster, but other times she comes across more like the Joker. This is not really a movie about first tender queer love. It’s a movie about boredom, alienation, and doing things just to feel something, whether it’s hooking up, smashing a car window, or taunting born-again Christians. House of the Dragon enthusiasts will be thrilled to learn that the excellent Paddy Considine has a meaty role in this movie as Mona’s older brother. — Sally Tamarkin
Mysterious Skin
Gregg Araki’s 2004 coming-of-age drama about sexual abuse, trauma, and aliens is a nuanced and captivating addition to the Gen X director’s oeuvre of films about chaotic youth. Aesthetically, Mysterious Skin is very Araki, opening with a dreamy slo-mo scene of a young boy being showered with Froot Loops over Slowdive’s ethereal cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair.” (It’s important to note that Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins scored the film as well, adding to the Araki shoegaze quality of it all.) But thematically, the movie strays from the director’s usual anarchic antics. The film follows two young adults — Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey — who become trauma-bonded during a night of pre-pubescent sexual abuse at the hands of their Little League coach. Years later, an adult Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a queer sex worker and adrenaline junkie who has outgrown his small town and moved to New York, while Brian (Brady Corbet) has become an alien-obsessed recluse who is convinced he was abducted by extraterrestrials as a kid, which is in fact a trauma response to his blackout during his childhood abuse. Araki handles the difficult subject matter with grace while remaining unflinchingly real — a delicate balance that makes Mysterious Skin a compelling watch 20 years later. — Juan Velasquez
Strange Fruit
“Strange Fruit,” both the song sung by Billie Holiday (and later by Nina Simone) and the Abel Meeropol poem upon which it was based, were made to protest the violent lynchings of Black people in America. The 2004 film Strange Fruit, a stirring thriller written and directed by Kyle Shickner, continues that tradition, crafting a haunting but gripping story about a successful Black gay attorney living in New York who is forced to return to his small Louisiana hometown when he receives a phone call informing him that a childhood friend, also Black and gay, has been mysteriously lynched outside of a local gay bar. Part of one of my favorite genres — “big-city hot-shot returns home to solve a crime” à la Sharp Objects or Under the Bridge — Strange Fruit paints a fascinatingly nuanced portrait of prejudice in the Deep South by connecting the legacy of Jim Crow-era racism to modern-day homophobia. Though the film’s sometimes shoddy production value may be a turn-off, its gripping central mystery and truly shocking final-act reveal are more than worth the price of admission. — Michael Cuby
D.E.B.S.
D.E.B.S. shouldn’t exist. A horny, silly, and surprisingly earnest movie about plaid-skirted lesbian spies is jarringly out of step with the homophobic pop culture landscape of the era, which scarcely acknowledged sapphic desire apart from a male gaze. Today, Angela Robinson’s cult classic action-comedy almost feels made-up, like a movie-within-a-movie that was invented for a historically revisionist aughties period piece. (This was probably playing on the next channel up from The Pink Opaque in the universe of I Saw the TV Glow.) But D.E.B.S. is definitely real, the same way the Wachowskis’ Bound actually gave us Gina Gershon fingering Jennifer Tilly all the way back in 1996! It’s a cinematic lesbian miracle that deserves a place of honor in any 2004 time capsule. — Samantha Allen
Wild Things 2
Sometimes the only thing you’re in the mood to watch is a really bad movie. This direct-to-DVD erotic thriller has nothing to do with the 1998 Kevin Bacon/Matt Dillon vehicle that preceded it, but it does have everything we want in a schlocky lezploitation flick: gratuitous beach volleyball scenes; a heavy-handed “deadly flower” metaphor; and no fewer than seven plot twists, only the second of which is the reveal that two characters are secret lesbians. Grey’s Anatomy bisexuals will rejoice at Isaiah Washington as an insurance investigator attempting to unravel the film’s many scams. There’s a thin line between “erotic thriller” and “softcore porn,” but Wild Things 2, er, rides it — and while they may not be making High Art, the cast’s collective commitment to the bit certainly makes for an enjoyable ride until the very last mid-credits reveal. Watch it with a room of sapphic friends who like to riff, drinking game rules optional. — Samantha Riedel
Tropical Malady
Directed by acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tropical Malady is divided into two seemingly disparate halves, the first a love story of sorts between a soldier and a villager, and the second a mythic tale of another soldier who is tasked with killing a tiger shaman. In the first half, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) is a soldier sent to investigate the killing of cattle at farms in a rural Thai town, and Tong is a villager who works at an ice factory. The two men become friends, bonding over late night talks, a karaoke session, and a visit to the movie theater; gradually, they become lovers, too. Nothing outwardly terrible happens to the pair, but don’t expect Tropical Malady to be a neatly wrapped “happily ever after” affair — especially since we hardly get an ending to Keng and Tong’s story before it transitions into something else, entirely. Weerasethakul is considered an icon of “slow cinema,” a term used to describe movies that are essentially light on plot but heavy on vibes. But ultimately, while the two halves of this movie may seem only loosely affiliated with each other, they are connected by the same underlying thread: the often uncomfortably intertwined relationship between desire and violence. If it wasn’t clear enough, Tropical Malady is a strange, surreal movie. It certainly will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is mine. — James Factora
Saved!
Saved! wryly sends up Christian purity culture in the form of a sweet comedy that’s ultimately about moving away from cisheteropatriarchal institutions that pathologize any alternative behaviors and life choices. Come for the pro-queer, pro-bodily autonomy, anti-Christian supremacy messaging, stay for the multiple storylines that follow couples you are really, really rooting for. Saved! isn’t really about how and why queer and trans people — and others marginalized by both comphet and Christianity — should throw off the shackles of such a narrow, harmful worldview; it’s about why everyone should. Saved! wants cis, straight, servants of a homophobic god to know that such perspectives shrink their worldviews, alienate them from their fellow humans, and ultimately undermine the messages of love and acceptance they otherwise preach.— Sally Tamarkin
Bear Cub
Get ready to fall in love with Madrid’s most eligible guncle. Bear Cub follows Pedro (José Luis García-Pérez), a middle-aged gay man who spends his time hooking up with sexy Spanish bears on the reg. In fact, the film cold-opens with a realistic and hot hirsute sex scene. But Pedro’s life gets turned upside down when his free spirit hippie sister drops off his sensitive nephew Bernardo (David Castillo), completely unannounced, before leaving for a vacation in India. A sensitive nine-year-old whose father has passed away, Bernardo quickly grows attached to Pedro, and when his mother is arrested for drug possession abroad, his stay with his uncle is extended indefinitely. What ensues is a touching and sincere story of an unconventional family unit, with Pedro and Bernardo building each other up with the help of close friends. But what stands out most about Bear Cub is it challenge to the stereotypical gay male representation from the 2000s: Instead of focusing on the hairless, chiseled twinks and muscle men typical of the metrosexual aughts, it presents bearish men with dad bods as the objects of desire. Additionally, Pedro is portrayed as realistically flawed and somewhat lost well into middle age, speaking to the late-bloomer tendencies that many gay men experience. Despite Pedro being HIV+, the movie avoids ending with his death from AIDS, offering a more nuanced and hopeful perspective of living with the virus. For someone like me, who grew up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, this portrayal was particularly impactful. — Juan Velasquez
Brother to Brother
Brother to Brother kicks off with an appropriately incendiary lecture about the erasure of James Baldwin’s queerness in discussions of his legacy, and for the next 90 minutes, the film continues in its radical dedication to uncovering the stories of our queer Black past. Part coming-of-age story, part historical retelling, Rodney Evans’ formally inventive drama puts Columbia University art student Perry (a young Anthony Mackie) next to Richard “Bruce” Nugent, a homeless older man Perry eventually learns is a forgotten fixture of the Harlem Renaissance. As the two Black gay men form an unlikely friendship over a shared interest in poetry and art, Bruce opens up Perry’s eyes to the undertold gay history of the Harlem Renaissance, regaling him with stories about LGBTQ+ figures like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman. Through them, Perry learns that he is part of a storied lineage and that many of his current problems — racism in interracial dating; the oversimplifying commodification of complex Black art — have been plaguing Black gay men like him for decades. A rightful winner of Sundance’s Special Jury Prize, Brother to Brother blesses us with an intergenerational tale for the ages. — Michael Cuby
Touch of Pink
What you need to know about Touch of Pink is that current hyperonline babygirl Kyle MacLachlan plays an imaginary version of Cary Grant who appears only to a gay Muslim man in London named Alim (Jimi Mistry). Written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid, this rom-com about parental acceptance has a fairly classic concept: Alim’s mom (Suleka Mathew) is coming to visit and — you guessed it! — she doesn’t know he’s dating a man (Kristen Holden-Reid). But bear in mind that this movie was made 16 years before Happiest Season. (We’ve been doing “mom and dad don’t know” plots for a while, y’all!) This movie may be formulaic, but it’s also a lot of fun — and after you watch it once, you will forever hear Kyle MacLachlan in your head saying, “How about a mimosa for my little samosa?” in a perfect Cary Grant staccato. — Samantha Allen
Summer Storm
This queer coming-of-age German indie film about falling in love with your best friend did for rowing what Challengers did for tennis — well, on a much smaller scale. Longtime friends and crew teammates Tobi (Robert Stadlober) and Achim (Kostja Ullmann) are inseparable. (They even masturbate together in the first five minutes of the movie!) A classic “will they, won’t they” story, Summer Storm makes it obvious from the beginning that Tobi is in love with Achim, who of course has a girlfriend. Most of the film takes place in the course of a weekend camping trip in which rowing teams from all over Germany congregate to train and compete. At the regatta, a team called “The Queerstrokes” replaces the Berlin women’s team, much to the dismay of Tobi’s toxically hetero teammates. But the newcomers create a catalyst for Tobi to come out when he befriends one of their competitors after being rejected by Achim. This XY mag-coded film rife with shirtless twinks in compromising positions has echoes of other beloved teen movies about burgeoning queer sexuality like Get Real and Beautiful Thing. But unlike those films of secret hookups and unrequited love, Summer Storm has a whole crew of out and proud queer youth who are badass, unapologetic, and inspiring. — Juan Velasquez
She Hate Me
A “Spike Lee Joint” is nothing without its accompanying controversy, and She Hate Me is no exception. Focused on a down-on-his-luck biotech executive who stumbles into a very lucrative gig impregnating baby-ready lesbians — with his bisexual ex-girlfriend acting as his de facto pimp — the film even sounds problematic. It would be easy to write it off as a straight male fantasy, where the horny protagonist is blessed with the opportunity to have endless sex with a bevy of beautiful but otherwise inaccessible women. But like all Spike Lee satires, She Hate Me had more on its mind, and I’m not referring to its white-collar crime B-plot. Through its admittedly daring premise, She Hate Me bravely dove into compelling conversations about the prejudiced complications surrounding queer child-rearing, the benefits of consensual sex work, the fluidity of sex and sexuality, and the limitless possibilities of building a “modern family.” In 2004, few people were ready to open-mindedly engage in such discourse. Twenty years later, many are still catching up. — Michael Cuby
Hellbent
Hellbent is half queer slasher, half queer hangout movie. Set largely at the West Hollywood Halloween Carnival, complete with footage shot on location, Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’ independent horror movie follows a gay police tech named Eddie (Dylan Fergus) and his group of friends as they try to evade a sickle-wielding killer in a devil mask, but there are also plenty of scenes showing unbridled queer nightlife — a rare sight on film during this decade. Etheredge-Ouzts said in an interview with a now-shuttered blog that he used standard “slasher stereotypes as starting points for the characters,” putting a gay twist on stock tropes like “the slut,” now reimagined as a trying to get laid while in drag, and “the final girl.” The result is a hidden gem that feels ahead of its time given the sheer amount of queer horror that has come out since. In that same interview, Etheridge-Ouzts said that “horror films can hold interest for audiences despite temporal distance.” No kidding! Twenty years later, this one is still fascinating. — Samantha Allen
Bad Education
This film is one of Pedro Almodóvar’s best, mostly due to its Russian-doll plot and metafiction vibes. Staring Gael García Bernal looking snatched both in and out of drag, this is a labyrinthine film that, much like memory itself, blurs the lines of reality and fantasy. A noirish melodrama about desire, ambition, revenge and, among other things, molestation in the Catholic church, Bad Education would be almost impossible to neatly summarize. Instead you should just get lost in its technicolor fever dream of film. As usual, Almodóvar plays with gender and identity in surprising ways — especially given that this a 2004 film set in both pre- and post-Franco Spain, tracking the rampant Catholic moral panic of that era. Also, much like the Almodóvar classic Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the film is very, very red. — Juan Velasquez
Dorian Blues
On paper, Dorian Blues, a comedy about a high school senior who finally accepts his gayness but struggles to come out to his family, could have easily been just another sad-sack story about navigating the terrors of the closet. (In fact, it even features several of the genre’s key trademarks: a religious crisis of conscience, an overbearingly homophobic dad, a tragically closed-off mom.) But the titular Dorian (Michael McMillian) is far from your stereotypical bullied wallflower. Thanks to careful characterization and some delightfully snarky first-person narration, this witty comedy avoids cliché. Dorian Blues follows its titular protagonist through his first kiss, his first sexual experience, his first boyfriend, and in a hilarious third-act twist, his first breakup. A clever coming-of-age story that packs a biting punch, Tennyson Bardwell’s debut is an easygoing charmer that will, if nothing else, forever change the way you think about color. Always remember: pink and fuschia are not the same. — Michael Cuby
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