Quentin Tarantino Makes the Case That Top Gun Is a Secret Gay Love Story

Here we go: Quentin Tarantino once laid out a take on the original Top Gun that people either find hilarious, obvious, or outrageous depending on their tolerance for subtext. And yeah, he also made a point of saying he thinks the movie — especially the script — is great. But his read? Maverick vs. Iceman isn’t just a rivalry. It’s sexual tension on afterburners.

Tarantino’s Top Gun theory, straight from 1994

Back in 1994, Tarantino popped up in the indie movie Sleep With Me, essentially playing himself, and launched into a monologue about Top Gun being a story about a man wrestling with his sexuality. It’s a bit he’s famous for now, and it’s... pretty specific.

'It is a story about a man struggling with his own homosexuality. You’ve got Maverick: he’s on the edge, man.'

In the monologue, he frames Iceman and his crew as the openly gay alternative, urging Maverick to pick a lane, while Maverick teeters between worlds. Wild? Maybe. But this reading has been floating around for decades, and once someone points at the locker-room stares, the bar sing-along, and, yes, the sun-blasted beach volleyball sequence, you can see why the idea stuck.

It’s not just Quentin

This interpretation isn’t some lonely hot take. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s stance on the subtext is basically: interpret away. He’s said people can read it however they want. Co-writer Jack Epps Jr. has been even more direct about it, saying they didn’t write the film with that in mind, but he understands how viewers get there.

Even the late director Tony Scott brought in imagery pointing in that direction during prep: he showed evocative black-and-white photographs by Bruce Weber — the fashion photographer known for stylized male eroticism, including military-themed shots — as visual references for Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. So while Tarantino’s riff is spicy, the vibe he’s describing isn’t exactly coming out of nowhere.

Meanwhile, the 1986 backlash was very real

Context matters. Top Gun hit theaters less than a month after the Chernobyl disaster, when global anxiety was already running hot. The movie itself is pure adrenaline: high-risk dogfights, cocky flyboys, triumphant whoops after missions — the whole thing feels like a recruitment ad with a killer soundtrack. Critics at the time knocked it for glorifying war and military victory without showing the cost of failure or the human toll on the other side. That didn’t stop it from being a phenomenon then, and decades later the sequel basically kept movie theaters afloat for a minute.

Quick Top Gun stats

• Director: Tony Scott
• Cast: Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
• Year: 1986
• IMDb: 7/10
• Rotten Tomatoes: 59%
• Worldwide box office: $357 million
• Production: Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films
• Where to watch: Hulu

So, whether you see Top Gun as swaggering 80s action, a coded romance, or both, the movie’s layers are part of why it’s still getting argued about nearly 40 years later. Where do you land on the Maverick-Iceman spectrum — rivalry, longing, or a little of both?