The success of Heated Rivalry, the Crave smash hit TV show following two fictional rival hockey players who start a sexual relationship and fall in love, has brought new attention to gay sex onscreen. Suddenly it seems like everyone is talking about back arches, shower cruising and covert blowjobs in glamorous hotel rooms. But long before the hockey boys were getting down at the cottage, queers of all kinds were getting hot and sweaty on the silver screen. With that in mind, here are some of Xtra staff’s favourite LGBTQ2S+ sex scenes from film and TV history.
Brokeback Mountain (2005): There’s only one bed tent
For the amount of buzz that it generated at the time it came out, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t actually depict that much gay sex. It’s pretty much limited to one scene: Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger), cowboys who have been herding sheep on a mountain for the summer, are forced to share a tent, where the unspoken intimacy that’s been building between them finally breaks, and after a tense and extremely homoerotic tussle, they end up fucking. It’s brief, and you barely even see any skin (I guess it’s not gay if you keep your clothes on?), but that doesn’t make it less hot than any of the other scenes on this list. The pent-up anger and tension are what really make it, for me at least—Heath Ledger is so good at playing a man who’s deeply tortured by his own desires, and that’s all the more clear in the moment when he finally gives in to them.
—Oliver Haug, contributing editor
Disobedience (2017): Rachel Weisz spits in Rachel McAdams’s mouth
Disobedience, the 2017 film adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel of the same name follows a photographer Ronit (Rachel Weisz) who returns to her family’s Orthodox Jewish community after her father’s death. There she reconnects with a childhood flame Esti (Rachel McAdams) and all sorts of personal revelations and reflections on faith transpire. The film is an interesting meditation on community, faith, queerness and motherhood, centred around strong performances from both of its stars. And all of that’s fine and good, but what this movie is most remembered for almost a decade later (at least in my mind) is a delectably horny encounter the pair have at a hotel involving saliva. Never has the idea of spitting in your partner’s mouth come off as hot as it does here, and both McAdams’s and Weisz’s committed performances sell every moment of a long globule of spit dangling tantalizingly from one Rachel’s mouth to the other. Disobedience kicked off an excellent run of Weisz playing queer women, including 2018’s The Favourite and the underappreciated Dead Ringers TV reboot, but nothing reaches quite the horny highs we see here. And if you’re looking for additional reading, may I recommend this Reddit thread prompted by the film where lesbians debate whether spitting is actually sexy. My take … sure!
—Mel Woods, senior editor, audience engagement
Sense8 (2015): The orgy of all orgies
It is foolish to revel in nostalgia toward companies that do not care about you, but every once in a while I find myself missing the era when Netflix championed narratively thorny (and sexy!) queer shows instead of cancelling anything that failed to find a meteoric audience in its first week. For me, the peak of that era is Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Sense8. Before Pluribus took on queer trauma through the lens of a dystopian hivemind, there were the “sensates.” Sense8 follows eight strangers across the world who discover they are interconnected through their minds. The premise is rife with possibilities, but it shines in its treatment of the fluidity and eroticism inherent to their unique dynamic. Most notably, the series’ first season features an iconic, five-minute long orgy scene between the sensates that relishes shared pleasure. It’s edited with such tact that you can see and feel their carnal desires traversing minds, bodies, sexual identities and physical planes. It’s delightfully Wachowskian and really, really hot.
—Cody Corrall, social video producer
Bound (1996): Jennifer Tilly leads Gina Gershon’s hand
Corky and Violet, Violet and Corky, the most iconic duo to ever do it. “It” being having authentic dyke sex onscreen in the mid-’90s, outside of queer-made indie porn.
Aesthetically, the jeans-and-undershirt working-class butch and slip-dress-and-full-face-of-makeup femme was the quintessential uniform of our people, a look these two perfected. And the moment is when Violet (Jennifer Tilly) seduces Corky (Gina Gershon), taking her hand and bringing it to her chest, mouth and then under her dress. In the throes of things, she admits she concocted a whole scheme to get Corky into the apartment in the first place, some first-class manipulation.
If you’re looking for the ultimate femme top moment, the next time they fuck, this time starting in leather jackets and laced-up boots, in Corky’s truck (I swoon)—ultimate ’90s—Violet says, in her signature hypnotic whisper, that she apologizes for what she didn’’t do last time—fuck her. And she does.
Thirty years later, it holds up. Now we need a do-over that does away with skinny butch supremacy.
—Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, managing editor
Black Swan (2010): Mila Kunis blows Natalie Portman(’s mind)
I was 12 when Black Swan came out. I remember kids at school referring to it as the Scary Lesbian Ballet Movie. The other boys salivated over its girl-on-girl action. None of that meant anything to me until I watched it, at home, with my Catholic mother, on DVD. She made me cover my eyes for most of it. It made the movie even more confusing than it’s supposed to be.
Fifteen years later, I watched the movie again, and everything clicked into place. My childhood classmates were right to love the sex scene between Nina (Natalie Portman) and Lily (Mila Kunis), although their reasoning was misplaced. Of course, it’s hot—Lily sensually and vigorously eats Nina out, allowing the latter to release, through moans of drug-addled ecstasy, some of the pent-up tension that has been eating her alive throughout the film. But their sex is more than something to leer at. It is the death knell for Nina’s unravelling psyche. Lily and Nina’s intimate moment begins to haunt the film, rendering Nina’s feverish descent all the more captivating.
—KC Hoard, associate editor, culture
Interview with the Vampire (2022): Sam Reid makes Jacob Anderson levitate
Interview with the Vampire is far and away the best queer television show we’ve had in recent years. Using Anne Rice’s iconic novels as a jumping-off point, AMC’s take revels in the art of seduction and the queerness of gothic horror from the very beginning. In the show’s first episode, Lestat (Sam Reid) starts as an observer attentively watching his new fascination Louis (Jacob Anderson) be intimate with sex worker Lily (Najah Bradley) before he decides to join in on the fun. Lestat engages in what one could only describe as vampire foreplay as he vocalizes his desires in a way that only Louis can hear them in his mind before removing Lily from the picture. The way they finally come (and levitate) together is jaw-dropping. It’s undeniably a hot scene, especially in how it interweaves the dual revelations of Lestat’s true nature as well as their undeniable attraction to each other. There is so much tension and uncertainty between Louis and Lestat throughout Interview with the Vampire—and we should be so grateful for how the show took no time to cement itself as an unabashed and gorgeously horny production.
—Cody Corrall, social video producer
Wayward (2025): Sarah Gadon has Mae Martin crawling on all fours
Wayward knows how to get into your head. The Netflix thriller centres on trans cop Alex Dempsey (Mae Martin) as he arrives in the fictional small town of Tall Pines, ready to start a new chapter with his pregnant wife Laura (Sarah Gadon). But as Alex begins investigating the local school for troubled teens, he discovers unsettling secrets about the town, its close-knit community and Laura. Over the course of the series, Laura ascends to cultish power, somewhat to Alex’s horror. Despite his toxic aspirations toward masculinity and dreams of being a protector for his family, Laura is in control in their relationship—and deep down, Alex likes that. At no point is that clearer than in the dom/sub scene at the end of Episode 5. Laura tells a mesmerized Alex to get on all fours and crawl to her before fucking him from behind. It’s not often that you see a transmasc bottom (in both senses of the word) in a sex scene, and the moment, in all its kinky glory, makes it worth the wait.
—Tobin Ng, contributing editor
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