January 23, 2017 · By Chris Parkhurst
Guide to gay movies on iTunes
Gay movies fall into a curious place on iTunes that makes it hard to find all the films in one place. As films can be found in every genre, gay-themed movies are often labelled ‘special interest’, and yet they’re of general interest to us.
Every pride season Apple releases a special LGBT section on iTunes featuring music, apps, books and movies from queer artists, filmmakers, writers and developers, but when pride is over the pages vanish from iTunes. You can’t simply pick ‘gay’ or ‘LGBT’ from the list of genres, and good luck finding the collections page for LGBT movies.
Related: Rending gay movies online
Availability of films is also an ongoing problem. Some movies are no longer available, while other great classics of queer cinema have yet to be added to the iTunes movie catalog. We maintain our own database of gay movies available on iTunes which we regularly update to make sure we have what’s current.
Of course another issue is availability of films in other countries as movie rights making renting the same film difficult. Our database is primarily for US iTunes customers, however there are a few surprises for customers in the UK or Canada.
There may be thousands of movies available on iTunes, but only a few hundred LGBT films. You’ll find big Hollywood films easily available, what is harder to get are the small independent films, especially from the 1990s. Films are divided into genres with the largest collection being gay dramas, but you will also find gay horror, a genre packed mostly with gay vampire films.
Over the years as new gay movies have been added to the iTunes catalog, we’ve even marked a few stand-out films each year, such as the 10 best gay films on iTunes or the 10 best gay films of 2014 (it was a good year).
At this time we’ve also focused on ensuring we have the complete collection of gay movies, however this means we haven’t added lesbian pictures or documentaries.