
The Best of Boys in Love is a wildly diverse collection of films that mixes styles, settings, and stories ranging from "elegant gay romance" (Frontiers), to a musical send-up of Hollywood, to an "exquisite period piece" (Village Voice) set in New Zealand. The DVD features seven audience favorites selected from our collection of award-winning gay short films.

The Best of Boys in Love is a wildly diverse collection of films that mixes styles, settings, and stories ranging from "elegant gay romance" (Frontiers), to a musical send-up of Hollywood, to an "exquisite period piece" (Village Voice) set in New Zealand. The DVD features seven audience favorites selected from our collection of award-winning gay short films.
1996-02-01
3.333
Seven award-winning gay short films
6.4Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.
6.8At a birthday party in 1968 New York, a surprise guest and a drunken game leave seven gay friends reckoning with unspoken feelings and buried truths.
5.8August tells the story of two former lovers, Troy and Jonathan, who reunite after a long ago painful breakup. After spending several years in Spain, Troy returns to Los Angeles and decides to phone Jonathan and meet for coffee. A seemingly innocent rendezvous turns into an attempt to revive passions past. Only this time it's not that simple as Jonathan has a new beau, Raul, and is trying to make the right decision a second time around.
7.0The story of two radically different men thrown together in a Latin American prison cell. One is Valentin, a journalist being tortured for his political beliefs. The other is Molina, a gay window-dresser who fills their lonely nights by spinning romantic fantasies drawn from memories of old movies.
7.4The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.
6.2An outrageous erotic poem focusing on the daydreams of a beautiful boy prostitute who, from the seclusion of his ultra-kitsch apartment, conceives a series of interlinked narcissistic fantasies populated by matadors, dancing boys, slaves, and leather-clad bikers.
6.6Two stories featuring Marvel's anti-hero The Incredible Hulk and his encounters with the X-Man Wolverine and the god known as Thor.
6.8A Brooklyn teenager juggles conflicting identities and risks friendship, heartbreak, and family in a desperate search for sexual expression.
6.9Set in the early 1990s, "As You Are" is the telling and retelling of a relationship between three teenagers as it traces the course of their friendship through a construction of disparate memories prompted by a police investigation.
7.0Drama telling the story of Blue, a young man of Jamaican descent living in Brixton in 1980, as he hangs out with his friends, fronts a dub sound system, loses his job, struggles with family problems and has his friendships tested by racism.
6.7During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.
6.6In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.
6.0An uptight insurance man and his film-censor wife become a kinky couple's landlords.
6.3Biographical drama based on the last 20 years of Crisp's life. The literary figure and gay iconoclast emigrated to New York in 1981 and lived there until his death. The film observes Crisp in both his public and private lives, from his seemingly cavalier response to the outbreak of AIDS to his tender relationship with his friend Patrick Angus and his own response to growing old.
6.8Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
6.4A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.
7.8Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1991. High school freshman Charlie is a wallflower, always watching life from the sidelines, until two senior students, Sam and her stepbrother Patrick, become his mentors, helping him discover the joys of friendship, music and love.
6.9A decade after the death of an American TV star, a young actor reminisces about the written correspondence he once shared with the former, as well as the impact those letters had on both their lives.
6.4It's San Francisco in 1957, and an American masterpiece is put on trial. Howl, the film, recounts this dark moment using three interwoven threads: the tumultuous life events that led a young Allen Ginsberg to find his true voice as an artist, society's reaction (the obscenity trial), and mind-expanding animation that echoes the startling originality of the poem itself. All three coalesce in a genre-bending hybrid that brilliantly captures a pivotal moment-the birth of a counterculture.
6.5In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
7.5Tala, a London-based Palestinian, is preparing for her elaborate Middle Eastern wedding when she meets Leyla, a young British Indian woman who is dating her best friend. Spirited Christian Tala and shy Muslim Leyla could not be more different from each other, but the attraction is immediate and goes deeper than friendship. But Tala is not ready to accept the implications of the choice her heart has made for her and escapes back to Jordan, while Leyla tries to move on with her new-found life, to the shock of her tradition-loving parents. As Tala's wedding day approaches, simmering tensions come to boiling point and the pressure mounts for Tala to be true to herself.
5.8The inmates and guards of a modern, clean and efficient maximum security wing are slowly and increasingly brutalized until they erupt in violence.
0.0When their homes in rural Jamaica become unsafe, a queer teen and his cousin dare to confide in their aunt.
10.0Mitch is grounded. She's a realist, a thrifter, an adventurer. Sedona is cool. She's a singer, an artist, a radical. When the two meet at a party, they almost instantly fall in love. But how far can they get on love alone?
6.1A group of mourners travels by train to bury a recently deceased artist in Limoges. As they journey, secrets and desires unfold, with relationships shifting, past loves resurfacing, and personal connections revealed. At the funeral and afterward, tensions rise among the group, leading to further emotional complexities at the artist’s family home.
5.0A black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, with archival footage and photographs intercut with a story. A wake is going on, with mourners gathered around a coffin. Downstairs is an elegant bar where tuxedoed men dance and talk. One of them has a dream in which he comes upon Beauty, who seems to reject him, although when he awakes, Beauty is sleeping beside him. His story and his visits to the jazz and dance club are framed by voices reading from the poetry and essays of Hughes and others. The text is rarely explicit, but the freedom of gay Black men in the 1920s in Harlem is suggested and celebrated visually.
5.9Dorian realizes he is gay in his final year of high school. He meets another gay youth locally, but remains confused. He starts therapy, then resorts to confession in the Church, and finally comes out to his brother. Dorian then decides to come out to his father; he gets kicked out of the house.
4.9This endearing drama depicts the lives of five gay friends — in conflict with themselves and each other — at the dawn of the AIDS era. Back in 1978 everything seemed possible. For Phillip and Guy, there was the thrill and exhilaration of first love. For their friends Devon, Jerry and Todd, life was still an open book with so many pages yet to be filled. Ten years later, his friends are all gone and Phillip is left alone to make sense of the joys and sorrows of his past life — as he looks hopefully to the future. The lives of two ordinary men who find love together only to lose it. In an era of easy sex and open relationships they have only two rules: Don't fall in love with others and no jealousy. Still rules are made to be broken. Eventually a single act of forgiveness restores their love.
7.0This true story, which takes place in Fort Campbell, KY, tells the heart-wrenching story of the life and tragic death of soldier Barry Winchell. His love for Calpernia Addams, a transgender nightclub performer, was misunderstood by his fellow soldiers and eventually led to his murder.
4.9The ex-wife of a famous sculptor convinces her lover to remove one of his sculptures from an exhibition and replace it with a live model.
5.2A gay man approaching a mid-life crisis is tired of being different because he is gay. He wants to be normal. Suddenly he is yanked back in time to when he was in high school. But this time, the world is gay and to be straight is considered deviant behavior. Then something else happens. He meets a girl. And suddenly normal becomes ...well almost normal.
5.7Robbie Levinson and Trey McCoy suddenly encounter intolerance and hostility at the hands of their new neighbor, Chris Boyd, the son of a fundamentalist preacher.
5.7A fictionalized account of what may have happened when John Lennon and Brian Epstein went on holiday together to Spain in 1963.
5.1Chisato is a beautiful 35-year-old writer, who looks like 18, and the father of Riju, a cute 15-year-old boy. Chisato's hobby is to drive away all of Riju's friends because he thinks they want to corrupt his precious child, so he shows his good side to these boys while he poisons the cake he brings them with a smile; however, there is one guy, Shunsuke, who doesn't fall for the tricks. But is Shunsuke really aiming for Riju? Who is that mysterious writer Chisato loves so much? And why is Chisato convinced that Riju's friends want to take advantage of him?
10.0A coming-of-age story that follows Matias, an Argentine filmmaker in his forties, struggling with an unfinished movie inspired by his elusive first love to Alexander, a Swedish friend he met at an international school in the 90’s. Tenderness and fascination define their strong friendship, which is short-lived when Alexander is suddenly expelled back to his country, leaving young Matias with an unresolved story of undeclared emotions. 25 years later, and Matias decides to reopen Pandora’s box as he embarks on a journey to find the ending to his story by coming face-to-face with Alexander, discovering life imitating art.
9.0Lin Qinnian tries to distance himself from Li Guang as feelings complicate their friendship, but the looming college exam might change their paths forever.
6.6One day Pak, a taxi driver who refuses to retire, meets Hoi, a retired single father, in a park. Although both are secretly gay, they are proud of the families they have created through hard work and determination. Yet in that brief initial encounter, something is unleashed in them which had been suppressed for so many years. As both men recount and recall their personal histories, they also contemplate a possible future together.
4.0ErOddity(s) is a collection of four exceptional short stories set in the world of erotic fantasy. In "Forever Mine", a confused boy seeks a love that will last him a lifetime. A teen's long forgotten past leads to his short lived future in "A Mind of Their Own"; proving some things should remain in the closet! A Christmas present, in the hands of a young voyeur, leads to a holiday tale of woe in an "Unsolved Christmas". And finally, in "The Way To a Man's Heart", an abused lover gets his revenge from beyond the grave.
5.3Welcome to the front lines of AIDS activism, where the latest enemy raids are being run by a band of unlikely warriors: two drag queens, an HIV-positive man with tiny gemstones dotting his bald head, and his HIV-positive sister.
6.9Michael and Robert, two gay men living in Brooklyn, spend their last day together before Robert leaves for Africa on work assignment. Michael still has feelings for his friend Nick, who has AIDS.