1. Back to the Future
2. Rambo: First Blood Part II
3. Rocky IV
4. The Color Purple
5. Out of Africa
6. Cocoon
7. Jewel of the Nile
8. Witness
9. The Goonies
10. Spies Like Us
Desert Hearts
This lesbian classic was released in the U.S. is 1986, but began to show up on the film festival circuit in 1985. Reportedly, when The L Word launched production, cast and crew were instructed to watch Desert Hearts to show what a lesbian love scene should look like. The film is based on Jane Rule’s 1964 novel Desert of the Heart.
Donna Deitch directed this account of a 1950s college professor’s (Helen Shaver) visit to Reno for a quickie divorce. There, Shaver meets a sculptor (Patricia Charbonneau) with whom she falls in love. Denise Crosby and Audra Lindley also starred.
The film was noteworthy at the time for having its couple end the film together, in a relative state of happiness. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel wrote that Desert Hearts “is a gentle story of someone being brought in from the cold. And its final scene, as corny as it may be, will leave you most satisfied in the great tradition of classic Hollywood love stories.”
On her website, Deitch said that a sequel to Desert Hearts, set in New York City, is in the works.
The Color Purple
The Color Purple was director Steven Spielberg’s first foray into straightforward drama, and was greeted with critical acclaim and large box-office receipts, if not Oscars; the film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards but won none. Among those performers Spielberg engaged just as they were breaking out were Whoopi Goldberg, in the lead role of Celie, and Oprah Winfrey.
But Spielberg faced criticism for tackling Alice Walker’s original novel, and glossing over, amongst other issues, Celie’s lesbian relationship with her husband’s longtime mistress Shug Avery (Margaret Avery). While Walker describes the relationship at length in the novel, the film distills that to a kiss. In 2011, Spielberg admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he was fearful he could not get a PG-13 rating had he shown more.
“In that sense, perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters between Shug and Celie, because I did soften those,” he said. “I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism for that.”
Kiss of the Spider Woman
William Hurt became the first straight actor to win an Oscar for playing a gay character in this adaptation of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, which was also the first independent film to be nominated for Best Picture.
Hurt plays Molina, a gay man who is jailed alongside Arregui (Raul Julia), a political prisoner, in a South American country. As Arregui, who has been drugged by their jailers, slips into a haze, Molina entertains him with the story from an Nazi propaganda film. Eventually, however, it is Molina who is transformed and, upon his release, he becomes part of Arregui’s cause.