Good movies with gay characters are hard to find. But, the folks over at Afterelton.com polled their readers to come up with a list of the 50 Best Gay Movies. Afterelton's Brent Hartinger writes:

Why aren’t there more good gay movies? We hear this complaint at AfterElton.com a lot, and we’ve even made it a few times ourselves (although we think the results of this poll prove that there are more good movies than many of us think!). There are surely many reasons why more “mainstream” movies don’t include gay or bisexual themes, but no doubt one of them is heterosexual discomfort – not just discomfort on the part of audiences and network executives, but also discomfort on the part of critics and others to champion these films.

This is where our poll of AfterElton.com readers on the 50 Greatest Gay Movies comes in. We can think of no better way to encourage the creation of more good gay movies than to praise and support the existence of past good gay movies! How does this list compare to our previous poll? Not surprisingly, many of the same movies made the list. After all, a great movie is a great movie. But there were some interesting shifts and additions. Two films that came out last year didn’t just make this year’s list, they actually made the top ten. It’s probably no surprise that the Oscar-winning Milk debuted at #4, but it’s downright spectacular that the independent arthouse film Were the World Mine, made on a shoestring budget, landed at #8.

Sadly, some movies fell so far that they dropped out of the top 50 entirely...

The 50 Best Gay Movies (2009) continues here .