While a few high-profile films have subverted the stereotyped or sidelined LGBT character in recent decades, such as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) or Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015), equality of LGBT representation in cinema still seems some way off. A US study on the top 100 films of 2016 showed that only 1.1 per cent of speaking characters were gay, lesbian or bisexual, no speaking character was identified as transgender, and only one film featured a gay protagonist. That film was Moonlight.

But Barry Jenkins’s film has perhaps turned out to be something of a game-changer.

Scooping the coveted 2017 Best Picture Oscar, its success at Hollywood’s most prestigious award ceremony was seen as a coup, not only for featuring a gay protagonist (Brokeback was notoriously snubbed for the top prize back in 2006) but also for its rare depiction of homosexuality within the African-American community.

In its wake, this year’s film festival season has seen an incredible array of high-quality LGBT pictures with explicit representations of sexuality – not only on the arthouse margins of cinema but in the mainstream as well. From Billie Jean King biopic Battle of the Sexes to Oscar-tipped Call Me By Your Name, God’s Own Country (Francis Lee’s Yorkshire Brokeback) to Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman about a transgender singer, 2017 has seen a diverse range of narratives, from the overtly taboo-breaking to the understated slice-of-life, exploring themes such as complex desire and toxic masculinity in authentic, nuanced ways.

The Independent spoke to some of the directors and actors involved in this year’s most prominent LGBT films about the characters and themes, and whether we really are seeing that long-awaited shift in the kinds of sexuality that can be depicted on the big screen.

Sundance Award-winning Beach Rats is an incredibly raw and emotive film with a dark underbelly. It follows breakout British star Harris Dickinson as Frankie, a ruggedly beautiful, angst-ridden teenager caught between two worlds: playing ball and chasing girls with his layabout friends in gritty, outer Brooklyn, and closeted desires, given air through flirting with men online and meeting them by night on cruising beaches. Writer and director Eliza Hittman explained to me how it built on her fascination with the genre, and her first female-centred feature It Felt Like Love. For her, depicting a young man’s struggle with his sexuality was not a goal in itself, but just a story to be told: “I think there’s room on the spectrum for a lot of different perspectives on sexuality. It’s just one representation of one experience in one part of the world.”

Battle of the Sexes is the new film from directing duo Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton – the pair behind Little Miss Sunshine – loosely based on the historic 1973 tennis match between top women’s player Billie Jean King, and self-confessed “chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs. While ostensibly a sports biopic, Faris and Dayton’s interpretation looks at how the publicity stunt became a battleground for equal rights, and explores Billie Jean’s private life in the lead up to the match, including her struggle with her repressed sexuality.

Emma Stone gives the performance of a lifetime as Billie Jean King, fully inhabiting the role which, she prepared for “in any way I could – I was essentially living in Billie Jean’s body”.
Andrea Riseborough plays Billie Jean’s hairdresser-turned-lover Marilyn, and spoke passionately on the red carpet of exploring this intense love story.

Call Me By Your Name is a stunning new film from auteur Luca Guadagnino was the talk of the film festival season. It centres on teenage Elio (Timothée Chalamet) whose passionate love affair with 24-year-old visiting academic Oliver (Armie Hammer) unfolds in a summer haze, in 1980s rural Italy.

Despite some controversy regarding the age gap between the characters – for Guadagnino, the film was not about breaking taboos. The director did reveal, however, at the film’s press conference that he faced challenges in financing the adaptation of André Aciman’s non-conventional love story, as “it didn’t play according to the textbook of the coming-of-age film and, in particular, the gay coming-of-age film, where there has to an internal and external antagonist”.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women’s writer and director, Angela Robinson had been obsessed with the true but little-known backstory to the controversial Wonder Woman comics. The creator, American psychologist William Marston (here played by Luke Evans), drew on his psychology theories and his polyamorous relationship with his wife Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall) and his live-in mistress Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) for his fictional character.

Her film is a bold and beautifully executed reinvention of the superhero origin story, which sits in stark contrast to the recent live-action movie featuring the comic’s heroine. She also enjoyed shifting away from what she sees as the pervasive “male point of view” when it comes to desire in cinema, while “the exchange of power throughout the movie is kind of consent as foreplay”. In telling theirs like any other love story, she presents what she terms “radical normalcy”: by challenging assumptions of what normal is, the radical becomes normal. “Where they come together in a fantastical world of their own making, they’re able to be their truest selves – either by exploring their sexuality or role-playing. It’s like they’re liberated from the world.”

Winning the Best First Feature award at the London Film Festival was The Wound, from South African director John Trengove, starring gay musician Nakhane Touré as Xolani, a factory worker who guides Kwanda, a city boy from Johannesburg, as he undergoes his rite of passage into manhood.

The intense, powerful film explores same-sex desire from three perspectives, as Kwanda asserts his queer identity while uncovering a hidden sexual relationship between Xolani and guide Vija. In a joint interview with the director and lead actor, Trengove explained that he specifically wanted to set a story of same-sex desire within traditional culture, something he considered potent at a time when “horror stories were coming out of Uganda about the human rights abuses there”, and Robert Mugabe “was making all these statements about homosexuality being ‘un-African’”.

He takes us claustrophobically close to his protagonists, while some of the bigger sequences involving multiple non-professional actors from the Xhosa community are borderline-documentary.

Finland’s entry into the 2018 Academy Awards, Tom of Finland, brings to the screen the story of the man behind one of the defining gay cultural icons of the twentieth century: Tom of Finland -, or rather, Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen. We see decorated WWII officer Touko, played magnificently by Pekka Strang, produce his illegal, homoerotic fetish illustrations, which eventually found mail-order popularity in 1960s US. With that came the status of a gay liberation icon, even as Touko also attempted to navigate his sexual desires in repressive post-war Helsinki.

Unashamedly explicit, his uniformed characters became a symbol of overt eroticism in the gay community, and helped give birth to an aesthetic visible from Queen to the Village People. But for some, the images remain as taboo today as they did then, as is evident from some conservative grumblings director Dome Karukoski told me he’s heard, “badmouthing the film as ‘gay-hugging’ and doubting its need to exist”. For Karukoski, it demonstrates that “taboos are broken an inch at a time”. He says: “I think we still left some to be broken.” He sees cinema as one the most powerful mediums in its ability is to broaden audiences’ perspective: “One important way is to liberate laughter and emotions by creating emotional entertainment. When those emotions are opened, it causes empathy. And empathy is the key for a better world.”