The 10 Hottest Queerest Movie Scenes of 2024

My original intent had been to write up a list of the hottest general scenes in the movies of 2024. But as I whittled down my final tally I realized that the list I’d come up with—whether due to my own preferences (hi gay) or if 2024 really was an especially horny one for the queers—was already 8/10ths non-hetero. So why not take us on all the way? I personally didn’t have a whole heap of interest in writing about Glen Powell & Adria Arjona’s admittedly palpable chemistry in Hit Man anyway. (But yes yes blazes et cetera.) And this gives me the chance to write about some really complex and not-easily-digestible moments in the year’s most excellent films—and in the quick listicle format, which is always the best way to dive into complicated sexuality.

Yes, that’s me warning you upfront—there was a lot of danger mixed in with this year’s eroticism. Messy power (bottom) dynamics everywhere! So cut me some slack if I just briefly allude to some thorny things without going full-hog into explications. I’m not B. Ruby Rich writing a new and extensive Queer Cinema Studies textbook here. We’re keeping it quick and punchy!

And also please beware of big spoilers for most of these movies! Don’t read the entry if you haven’t seen the movie (and you intend to) yet. Titles of the films will link to our reviews. All that said, without further ado…

Love Lies Bleeding—There might not have been a funnier edit in 2024 than one that director Rose Glass and editor Mark Towns gift us early on during the steamy portion of the romance between Kristen Stewart’s Lou and Katy O’Brian’s Jackie in “the Bound of the new millennium” Love Lies Bleeding. After wooing Jackie successfully with free steroids, Lou sits back and watches Jackie perform her bodybuilder poses, Lou’s cheeks flushing, biting on her lip in that perfect K-Stew way… and then cut to a close-up of the yolk being separated from an egg in slow, sticky motion. Incredible. And then, to drum it all home, a smash-cut to Lou getting smacked into a headboard as Jackie goes down on her something fierce. This was finally the year when Stewart aggressively embraced her queer icon status, posing in a jockstrap on the cover of Rolling Stone no less—see? It wasn’t all shit in 2024!

Queer—James Bond bringing snowballing mainstream! If your movie has John friggin’ Waters remembering a sex act that he’d long forgotten, then you know you’re doing something right. But while the cum-swap heard round the world was certainly something, it’s the last act Ayahuasca fuck that melds Bill (Daniel Craig) and Eugene (Drew Starkey) together like fleshy honey bears, seeing Luca Guadagnino turn gay sex into something nigh on spiritual. And you know I mean it because that’s a word this atheist loathes to use. But who could watch the commingling of selves we witness between these two and not understand how it would haunt a life forever after? As Lesley Manville’s jungle hillbilly opines, “You shoulda seen yourself last night.” (And god I love saying the phrase, “Lesley Manville’s jungle hillbilly.” What a movie!)

The Brutalist—No I don’t mean that scene. But anybody who doesn’t see that horrific scene near the end of The Brutalist coming maybe wasn’t paying attention to the relationship dynamics we witness in the film’s first half between Adrien Brody and Alessandro Nivola’s cousins.

The Brutalist is actually a surprisingly queer movie! And it’s in Nivola’s dangerously sexy performance as Attila, the assimilated cousin who takes in Brody’s László Tóth after he comes to America, that stands as a monumental masterclass in slathering unexpected desire across the screen. As sexy Attila and his sexy shiksa wife Audrey (Emma Laird) drunkenly entertain László in their small apartment, the throuple gets closer and closer, with Attila practically offering his wife up to László for his own viewing pleasure. That László rejects this scenario comes to almost immediately bite him in the ass—an early example of the sinister ways the film will show America to be a cudgel of sex of violence in the pursuance of power above all else.

I Saw the TV Glow—David Cronenberg’s spent his entire career making us feel funny about finding new holes in our bodies to waggle our fingers around in. But I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun is up to something very different, intent-wise, when we watch Justice Smith’s character of Owen run a box-cutter up his abdomen a la James Woods in Videodrome. It’s less “body horror” than it is body euphoria—the yonic-like wound that Owen tears open is (briefly) transformative; ecstatic. That Justice Smith is a furry little snack doesn’t hurt—the clash between the masculine and the feminine in this moment is Rapture, and it didn’t even need Debbie Harry this time.

Femme—Babygirl might have grabbed all of the late 2024 headlines but nowhere did power dynamics get more tossed about than they did by directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping in Femme, which turned the cliched tale of a gay (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) falling for their closested gay-basher (George Mackay) into an opera of monumentally fucked up lust.

There are three structural scenes in Femme that occur in the liminal space of night-time alleyways, with the bashing at the start and the big blow-out between the boys at the end book-ending what I consider to be the movie’s sexiest scene of all. This would be the one where the drag queen Jules (Stewart-Jarett) gets the hyper-masculine Preston (Mackay) to willingly cede his power in their relationship. Down on his knees. Taking Jules’ thumb down his throat like a good boy. Tops and bottoms be tumbling every which way y’all!

Babygirl—But speaking of Babygirl—yes, let’s! I did indeed manage to get the year’s hottest yet extremely heterosexual movie onto this, the gayest of lists! That’s talent. But some scenes in history seem to have been filmed purely with the intent of getting the audience to scream “Kiss!!!” at the screen, and the scene where Nicole Kidman’s husband (Antonio Banderas) discovers her secret lover (Harris Dickinson) is a prime example.

The men fight, naturally, as men do. But nobody gets bashed in the head with a snow-globe (Unfaithful hive holla) here—no instead both actors (who it must be noted have both played gay with great success previously) end up on the floor. Staring deep into one another’s eyes. And they start leaning in closer and closer, until their foreheads are touching. And director Halina Reijn holds this moment out excruciatingly, exquisitely long… and if the bastards had just started making out then voila, everybody’s damned problems would’ve been solved! Which brings me to…

Challengers—Yes, the three-way kiss is the easy answer here. Iconic 2024 shit, for sure. But Guadagnino’s film is a sweaty lust-fest from start to finish, and that’s where I want to take us—to the finish. Or rather the lack thereof. Because Challengers edges us right up to the point of explosion, and then it literally leaves us hanging—cutting to black as its main mates (my Pajiba 10 nominee Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist) are about to top one another over the net, with their power-brokering objet d’amour Zendaya (this year’s Pajiba 10 winner!) hooting for it on the sidelines. Every person I’ve ever had a conversation with about this movie in the months since its release always wants to talk their theories about What Happens After. But that’s always been Guadagnino’s greatest feat—making movies that linger on the lips.

Nosferatu—The story of Nosferatu (nee Dracula) is basically one of a dude who goes over to another dude’s house, they get drunk together and fool around, and then the first dude spends the rest of the story having total gay panic about it. Not a surprise given the supposed proclivities of writer Bram Stoker and director F.W. Murnau! But no other filmmaker has tapped into that angle as successfully as Robert Eggers does in his deliciously perverted 2024 adaptation. I literally pumped my fist in the theater when Eggers perfectly, exquisitely lands the sequence where Hoult’s Thomas Hutter (cue the film’s tagline) succumbs to the darkness that is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Oh to see him floating up out of bed, moaning the exact same little moans we’d already seen his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) moan in her prologue rendezvous with this disgustingly sexy devil! I won’t dispute that 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one horny movie, but it always bummed me out that Coppola chickened out having Keanu’s seduction happen at the hands of Drac’s three brides—Hutter’s deep-seated disgust at his own (to his mind) corrupt behavior is a hugely important part of the story’s primal driving force, and Eggers nails it. (Extra credit given to the fact that during Orlok’s feeding frenzy Nicholas Hoult admitted he could feel Orlok’s prosthetic penis rubbing on him, which is how he ended up with the Or-cock itself framed as his wrap gift.)

National Anthem—More than any other moment on this list this one’s mostly just about really beautiful people straight (so to speak) forwardly going at it. But photographer turned first-time filmmaker Luke Gilford proves exceptional at bringing several tensions to a head in the scene where queer rodeo newbie Dylan (Charlie Plummer) finally gets to lay down with his crush Sky (Eve Lindley)… AND her jealous boyfriend Pepe (Rene Rosado). Heretofore straight-identifying Dylan’s confusion about being attracted to a trans-woman; Sky and Pepe’s open relationship—it all explodes in a big queer burst of lust as the three of them literally roll around in the dirt with each other, everybody grabbing onto big ol’ fistfuls of everybody else. Hot wins!

Misercordia—For our last entry I almost went with one of the numerous extremely hot sex scenes involving extremely hot people in Mikko Mäkelä’s sex-worker drama Sebastian or Marco Calvani’s Provincetown-set love-story High Tide. But my dedication to perversity won out instead (imagine that). This film from Alain Guiraudie, the director of Stranger By The Lake (and talk about a movie full of people hot people having hot sex PLUS perversity), is about a middle-aged gay man Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) going to his rural hometown for a funeral, only to overstay his welcome long enough to fuck up everybody’s lives and commit some murder on the side. Nevertheless Guiraudie is incapable of not injecting sexual tension into the most seemingly banal and unsuspecting of places, and there’s a scene where Jérémie totally misreads the signals from his straight slobbish neighbor (Sébastien Faglain) that magically manages to be both sexy and utterly humiliating in equal measure. It works so well because of Guiraudie’s ability to unearth eroticism almost anywhere. And that’s as good a message as any to send us into 2025. We’re gonna need it.