He then proceeded to become a prominent active LGBTQ rights campaigner and HIV/AIDS charity fundraiser. If it couldn't get any sweeter, George Michael famously came out in 1998, right about the time I was starting to come out. Then when he went solo, he produced some of the best pop anthems like Careless Whispers, Freedom, Somebody To Love”, Fastlove, and so many more! Growing up, I used to love listening to all his hit songs with the pop band “Wham”. George Michael (RIP)Īs a fellow gay British Greek Cypriot also born/raised in North London(!), I will always have a strong personal affinity to the late George Michael – his birth name: Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. Wake Me Up Before You Go Go…Cause I Gotta Have Faith…Last Christmas, I Gave You My Heart… 3. Despite the country’s historic efforts to forget him, the name Alan Turing will not soon be forgotten by the LGBTQ community. It wasn’t until 2013 that he received a posthumous pardon from the Queen.Īmazingly, his acquittal in 2013 ignited a passionate flame that led to the formation of a new law nicknamed “ The Alan Turing Law” that saw nearly 50,000 men pardoned for their previous convictions of practicing homosexuality. He committed suicide by cyanide poisoning in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday. Instead, Alan Turing was arrested in 1952 because of his sexuality and accepted chemical castration treatment as an alternative to a prison sentence! Seriously, who knows where we would be without those big brains of his! The tragic side to his story is that his own country never truly recognized or appreciated his greatness during his lifetime.
Throughout his career, Turing found a way to crack coded messages that would help lead to the defeat of the Nazis and designed one of the initial stored-program computers. Cheers!Īs a society, we should be more appreciative of the work done by Alan Turing. We hope you have as much fun discovering these gay British icons as we did writing about them. Honestly, slimming down our list to only twenty people was a challenge! When it came time to begin brainstorming and researching all those incredible gay icons, we probably had about fifty names to choose from, all spread across various careers and lifestyles. Now, with so many queer folks living in and around Britain, it only makes sense that there would be more than a few icons floating about the crowd. Transgender individuals, too, have received plenty of recognition and protection in more recent years, which just makes our hearts soar! It has been estimated that roughly 5-7% of the population identifies as either lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
The United Kingdom as a whole rings of freedom for the LGBTQ community, which naturally means we gays flock to the country like moths to a flame, especially to the gay meccas in London, Brighton and Manchester. However, we would be lying if we said there weren’t other reasons we adore the entirety of Great Britain! It is always going to have a special place in our hearts for that reason. Here are eight movies on Netflix which explore sexuality in all its explicit glory (while avoiding the glory holes, but we can leave that to It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.We hope you have as much fun discovering and reading about these inspiring gay British icons as we did writing about them!Īlthough we come from different countries, London is the city that brought us together. Perhaps it's a sign of how far we've come that such a mainstream platform for online entertainment boasts a number of films which feature unsimulated sex, while at the same time having something more to say about sexuality and the human relationships surrounding it. There aren't an abundance of sexually explicit movies available (in fact, there's very little besides the films listed here) but what there is covers some impressive ground: sexual infidelity, youthful experimentation, sex addiction and even arousal through self-mutilation are all intimately explored. While Netflix don't do "porn", it's refreshing that the majority of the films on this list stand on their merits as impressive works of cinema, avoiding sensationalism and offering far more than crude titillation. It's hardly a surprising reaction, given that sex is one of the primary drives of human nature.
Whether it's admitted or not, people are inherently drawn to the rude and lurid, their libidinal impulses triggered by the sight of curving bodies pressing up against one another. There is always going to be a degree of salacious appeal in an article examining "sexually explicit" movies.