Though it has been said that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was key to ending slavery in the United States, the first time a book other than the Bible had changed the world, today it’s films and television which do more to change people’s perceptions. The impact of colour, movement, music and acting is so strong that it seems inevitable that mere printed words should take second place.

I remember seeing Midnight Cowboy (1969) not long after it came out, in 1970, perhaps, when I was a mere stripling of 19, and not very sure of my sexuality or even what being gay-shaded meant. The film is about Joe Buck (played by a very sexy and handsome Jon Voight), a naïve Texan, who goes to New York to make his fortune by whoring. But he doesn’t make much and ends up sharing a ratty dump with Ratso Rizzo (played extraordinarily well and convincingly by Dustin Hoffman) a cynical, heartless, unattractive con artist. A friendship ensues. Ratso gets sick, Joe starts to look after him. They plan on going to Florida, but before they do, Ratso dies. The film ends with Joe dropping his trademark leather buckskin jacket into a rubbish bin as he gets off the bus in Florida alone. It was the only X-rated film ever to win a ‘best picture’ Academy award.

For the first time, I saw on screen, a relationship between two men. Undoubtedly Joe and Ratso loved each other even though they never had sex. And the film made no judgements, at least not about gayness. It didn’t have the sort of moral message that the Mother Grundies would have approved of: gay is bad. Instead it showed the seamy life of the hopeless poor and the ways they tried to survive. It was a heartbreaking, timeless film, and it made me think for the first time that I might be OK. I wasn’t the only gay man in the world, and more to the point, that you didn’t need to be stereotyped to be gay. These were powerfully subversive sentiments.

The next gay film I saw, by the same director (John Schlesinger), was Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), about a cheerfully bisexual younger artist, Bob (played by Murray Head) and his two lovers Alex (a superb performance by Glenda Jackson) and Daniel, an older doctor (Peter Finch). Again, a matter-of-fact, judgement-free portrayal on screen of a homosexual relationship. It made it safe to be bi, even though in the end the young man tires of the awkwardness of two lovers and heads off to New York, suggesting as is still often implied and believed today, that being bi is impossible and unworkable. I remember particularly two scenes. In the first, Alex meets Daniel by chance at a party, where, needless to say Bob isn’t present (he’s not serious about love, even though both of the others are), and she apologizes with evident sincerity, “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you’d be here.” In the second, Daniel is standing on the pavement talking to someone, and his eyes drift to an approaching jogger, in singlet and gauzy nylon running shorts, all jostle and bounce, before returning his attention with a start to the woman he’s talking to. Very funny, but it made me realize that there were places where a man might stare at another man without being beaten up, where people could accept that there could be love between men without having to add that it was wrong. It just was. In the end, the judgment, if there is one, is against callow and superficial Bob, for whom the love affairs were mere fuckfests, shallow and easily endable. A slow-moving but entirely satisfying film about adults, not in the way the word is used now to mean sexual explicitness, but instead real grown-ups who try and make a difficult situation work.

Then, Cabaret. What an extraordinary film, set in 1930s Berlin, and based on the books Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains (both of which are quite masterly and highly recommended). The sleaze and seedy promise of the Berlin nightclub scene (“Even the band is beautiful!”), the threat of the Nazi stormtrooper “brownshirt” thugs, the feeling that here is the centre of things, the vortex where everything will change, a desperate attempt to pretend away at night in the dark of the floor and the spotlights of the stage at the Kit Kat Klub what everybody knows is happening outside. Michael York is Brian, Liza Minelli Sally Bowles, Joel Grey the compère of the club, and Helmut Griem plays Maximilian, the rich conservative Junker. Brian and Sally are friends and gold diggers, and Max takes them up, for a while. I remember my shock and surprise when Sally and Brian, invited to Max’s exquisite rural schloss, argue. “Fuck Maximilian!” says Sally. “I do!” says Brian. Years later, when I watched the film again, seeing handsome, sexy Brian (Michael York) playing the fool with Max, I was conscious of just how sexually charged this apparently innocent scene is.

The sinister compère, the authentic posters, the increasing evidence of the Nazi poison, all mix with the abortive love affairs and friendships to create a compelling story, a masterpiece. Oddly enough, it is in fact a musical, a genre I don’t usually much care for, but the film itself is so good you forget that fact.

Once more, it was an eye-opener to me. The world wasn’t a conservative, narrow, dull small town in country South Africa. Being gay wasn’t an unspeakable evil, an unspoken taboo. It happened. Naturally I fell in love with Michael York.

For someone else growing up gay or bi at a different time in a different place, these films might not have resonated. But for me, they helped me ultimately throw off the shackles of my upbringing and culture and come to terms with what I was. Of course, they were far from the only influences. Mary Renault’s The Charioteer guided me in places where no one else did, and was a light to me in my darkness. I think finding her book in a second hand bookshop in that small town quite literally saved my life. Peter Schaffer’s play Equus, which isn’t about being gay at all, but about passionate difference, made me consciously decide to accept who I was: who were others to dictate to me how I should live, when I did them no harm?

There are two recent films I want to add to the list, partly because they moved and pleased me, but mostly because they show how much things have changed in 30-plus years: Brokeback Mountain and Shelter. Brokeback Mountain needs no introduction, but what struck me about it was how many people didn’t even care about the ‘gay’ angle. It was, they said, just a story about two people who loved each other. Shelter made less of a splash (you can read my review of it here) but was even more ‘natural’. Two surfers in love, Zach and Shaun, with just the right amount of gay angst from Zach, both ending up acting as fathers to Zach’s nephew. These two films didn’t redirect my life (perhaps I’m just too old) but I wonder whether some gay or bi youngster who is in his late teens now will see them and feel what I felt when I saw my own iconic films all those years ago.