Pride-fully Cinematic
10 LGBTQ-related movies that aren't just trauma porn.
Wherever you fall on the color wheel or in the alphabet, your story deserves representation on screen. This Pride Month, I wanted to put together a selection of movies that represent that the LGBTQ+ experience as something more than painful coming out or persecution. These films (which, for obvious reasons, skew heavily contemporary) showcase the fullness of experience and emotion within a community that is anything but a monolith — and worth celebrating for their joy.
Appropriate Behavior, Criterion Channel, Tubi TV, and Freevee on Amazon Video
Basically “Chaotic Bisexual: The Movie.” Filmmaker and star Desiree Akhavan is a real force here as a first generation American struggling to be open with her family about the woman she loves. If you liked My Big Fat Greek Wedding or The Big Sick, consider this a queering of those love stories. Don’t let Billy Eichner or the press forget when Bros comes out later this year — he’s far from the first to play in the gay rom-com space.
BPM, Tubi TV and Pluto TV
I’m bending my “no trauma” rule here slightly just because I want everyone to see BPM that badly. This procedural drama of AIDS activism group ACT UP agitating for change and recognition from the French government is a masterful look at how activism happens at both an individual and institutional level. Filmmaker Robin Campillo refuses to gloss over internal dissent within the group or flatten the heroism into a single valiant figure. Instead, it’s a beautiful look at how community flourished in the wake of government inaction during a plague. They took care of themselves because they could not count on people with authority to do it for them.
52 Tuesdays, rental
🎶 How do you measure / measure a year? 🎶 Over the course of Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays, we chart the high highs and low lows of a mother-daughter relationship as the parent transitions to living as a male over the course of a year. They see each other only on Tuesdays, and the film assumes the fragmented, turbulent nature of their relationships as each sifts through their complicated feelings.
God’s Own Country, Hulu
If you liked Call Me By Your Name, consider God’s Own Country like a graduate seminar on the same topic. Not unlike Timothée Chalamet’s Elio Perlman, Josh O’Connor’s Johnny Saxby lives with a disconnect between his physical attraction to men and his emotional resistance to any kind of real intimacy. That all changes when a reserved Romanian farmhand, Alec Secareanu’s Georghe, comes to work his sleepy British pastures. Georghe jolts Johnny into facing the vulnerability that frightens him so. Their mutual journey of discovering how to express affection and care for one another is palpably heartfelt.
The Gospel of Eureka, Criterion Channel
Though heavily evangelical areas have begun to sharpen their knives against drag performers this month, the two need not be oppositional. The brief, blissful documentary The Gospel of Eureka depicts an Arkansas town that can harbor both a thriving queer community with a bumping drag bar and an elaborate arena to perform Biblical scenes. The film gently dismantles the barriers between the two spheres with its observational lens, suggesting that our divisions may not be as pronounced as they appear — and coexistence is possible.
Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, Hulu
Anyone who grew up or spent time in a milieu where cultural Christianity was the unquestioned, default setting will likely cringe in recognition at Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party. Stephen Cone’s graceful film examines a community’s conflicted and often contradictory take on sexuality and individual expression through the eyes of its titular closeted teenager. As he weighs how to be true to himself while still being an active and beloved member of the group, no caricatured villains manifest in this coming-out tale. It’s all the more difficult because we observe the good and the bad of the assembled party guests. Cone’s critique lands all the more because it’s delivered with a compassionate eye. (Also, Stranger Things fans — your eyes don’t deceive you. That is bébé Joe Keery.)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Hulu
“We’re not going to waste time and put you in that position where you will go through this conflict to tell the same thing, that it’s impossible,” filmmaker Céline Sciamma told me when I asked her why there is no overt villain in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. “The real tragedy is that it is possible, but it’s made impossible—by the world of men, mostly.” While SNL got in a few knocks at the film’s expense in the viral “Lesbian Period Drama” trailer, the film itself eschews many of those tropes as it charts two women finding mutual respect through art and love. Sciamma wisely focuses on these lesser-observed aspects of the story, wisely recognizing the audience will fill in the contextual gaps surrounding the film.
Straight Up, Netflix
What does this world have for people who want all the benefits of a relationship except for sex? That’s the question posed by James Sweeney’s oddball, offbeat rom-com Straight Up. The director also stars as neurotic, OCD-addled Todd as he pursues a partnership with a woman even in spite of widely recognized sexual orientation. He kindles a spark with hyperliterate Rory, but can their connection survive without … you know. The film avoids labels or generalizations, leaving vague on screen what so many people do in real life as well. Sometimes we might not know what we are, only how we feel.
Summer of 85, Showtime Anytime
Cheeky French director François Ozon is notorious for some of his more subversive, sexually transgressive films. (I’m still dying to know the actor who dropped out of his movie Double Lover out of a refusal to participate in a pegging scene, per our 2018 interview.) So imagine my surprise to find his sun-swept summer romance between two teenage boys … disarmingly sweet? You’ll never know how much a Rod Stewart song can give you the feels until you give yourself over to Summer of 85.
Weekend, Criterion Channel
Bumping what I already offered when I re-ranked my favorite movies of 2011 and placed Andrew Haigh’s Weekend at #9: “This quiet romance between two men sorting out all sorts of feelings — sexual, societal, interpersonal — presents itself rather unassumingly. Yet the effortlessness with which it conjures intimacy keeps this movie always lingering in my mind. How Haigh gets such vulnerability out of male characters without any situation or sentiment feeling contrived still astounds me. Not to flatten what the film means for gay cinema, but this is a must-watch for people of all stripes and sexualities.”
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd.
You can find me blasting Howard Shore’s Crimes of the Future score on repeat.
Been on a big book reading kick as of late and tore through Jenny Slate’s kinda-memoir Little Weirds. It’s certainly one of the most unique books of its kind as fanciful flights of imagination clash head-on with the inescapable reality of one’s self.
I was particularly struck by this quote, in part because it’s what I strive to do with a lot of the love I have for film and writing:
“This is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.”
Over at The Playlist, I reviewed Jurassic World Dominion. Feeling somewhat vindicated in my take by the box office performance — down from previous films yet still colossal — that it’s giving people what they want but with diminishing returns.
That’s it for today — RIP Philip Baker Hall.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall