‘Top Gun’ is the gayest movie ever made
Let’s take it all in
Published in
7 min readJun 11, 2022
In 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in Ronald Reagan’s America, Tom Cruise’s supergay military fantasy was the #1 movie of the year.
The famed reviewer Pauline Kael of The New Yorker dismissed it as “homoerotic commercial.” But the country loved Top Gun—and does to this day. It’s the strangest…gayest story?
“Top Gun”—the very title seems gay—was a gay enthusiasm on release.
A 1998 biography of Tom Cruise by Wensley Clarkson notes that “a large number of homosexuals went to see Top Gun over and over again because they enjoyed certain scenes in the movie.”
Which scenes, though? The whole movie is “a gay porn shoot,” as the gay critic Mark Simpson once wrote, starring “a desirable, smooth-skinned, buffed boy with a tarty grin.”
There was that volleyball scene.
“I didn’t have a vision of what I was doing other than just doing soft porn,” director Tony Scott recalled in an interview released in 2016 for the 30th anniversary Blu-ray/DVD.
