You can talk about Call Me By Your Name all you want — but for those of us raised on mid-2000s cinema, 2004 was the gay awakening no one labelled correctly.

It was a year of sweat, melodrama, eyeliner, and homoerotic tension disguised as “blockbuster energy.” It was Troy. It was Closer. It was The Notebook. It was Mean Girls. A lineup so bisexual it should’ve come with a warning label.

These movies weren’t queer on purpose. They were queer by accident — and that made them even gayer.

Let’s start with the obvious one. Troy was marketed as ancient warfare, but it was really two hours of bronzed men emotionally undressing each other in sandals.

Brad Pitt’s Achilles moved through the film like a man one breath away from making out with every opponent. Eric Bana’s Hector looked at him with the kind of doomed respect that only happens when you’ve already written poetry about someone you’re supposed to kill.

And listen — I don’t know how many times I rewatched the Brad Pitt/Rose Byrne sex scene just to see that arse. It was formative. It was cinematic. It was also, in hindsight, deeply cursed. Oh, Brad. You disappointing piece of shit.

It’s homoeroticism at its most cinematic: longing in wide shots, intimacy through choreography, grief in slow motion. Troy wasn’t a war film; it was an ancient Greek thirst trap.

Closer was the first time many of us saw bisexual chaos represented — not explicitly, but through emotional whiplash and Jude Law’s haircut.

It’s basically four people seducing, betraying, and emotionally manipulating each other in various shades of mauve. Everyone flirts with everyone. No one wins. It’s theatre, but horny. Natalie Portman and Clive Owen play pain like performance art, while Julia Roberts and Jude Law deliver lines that could be Grindr messages from 2012.

It’s not a love story; it’s a group chat you should’ve left months ago.

On the surface, The Notebook is heteronormativity’s crown jewel — two hot people screaming in the rain. But emotionally? Deeply queer.

The devotion. The melodrama. The performance of love so intense it borders on drag. Ryan Gosling builds a house for Rachel McAdams like a man auditioning for RuPaul’s Carpentry Race. The movie is basically about choosing obsession over logic — which is, let’s be honest, the queerest thing you can do.

If Troy gave us homoerotic tension, Mean Girls gave us queer identity formation in a crop top.

Damian was out before anyone else was ready to be. Janis was queer-coded with a vengeance. Regina George ruled like a soft-femme dictator. Even Cady Heron’s arc — falling in love with power, losing herself in performance, then rediscovering her real identity — reads like a coming-out allegory.

It’s high school as drag ball. “You can’t sit with us” was both a social rule and a prophecy.

2004 was obsessed with gothic spectacle — lace-up corsets, moral crisis, candlelit longing. Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing looked like a bisexual panic attack in leather. Gerard Butler’s Phantom stared at Christine like he’d never emotionally recovered from musical theatre camp.

Even The Village gave us coded yearning under colonial repression. Everyone was too repressed, too intense, too moisturised to be straight.

2004 didn’t give us open representation, but it gave us feeling. Big, messy, stylised emotion. The kind that didn’t know how to be subtle because it was too busy being sincere.

It was a year when every blockbuster looked like a music video and every line of dialogue sounded like foreplay. We didn’t have words for it yet, but our bodies understood.

Those films gave us permission to want more — more drama, more beauty, more meaning than the script could contain. We were supposed to leave the cinema thinking about romance. We walked out thinking about desire.