20 LGBTQ Movies Everyone Should Watch At Least Once
Samantha Jacobson
How have you not seen <i>The Watermelon Woman</i> yet?
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Sean Baker directed this raucous movie about transgender sex worker Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), out for revenge on her cheating boyfriend Chester (James Ransome) on Christmas Eve. The Hollywood Reporter called it "a singularly delightful girlfriend movie with an attitude," and Variety's Justin Chang said Tangerine is "an exuberantly raw and up-close portrait of one of Los Angeles's more distinctive sex trade subcultures." However you'd categorize it, it's a visually stunning movie with multiple trans characters who are actually played by trans actors, and it's worth your time for that reason alone.

The film, shot for next to nothing using three iPhones in 2013, captures Hollywood's charged radiance and sprawling grace with a deftness I have yet to see anyone else match. A lot of folks say it made the area look seedy in contrast their idea of Dideon's bikini-glammed LA and the skin-deep glossiness of the movie industry (looking at you, everyone at the Guardian and New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis), but I lived in Hollywood for years and had an apartment a few blocks from many of the locations in the film at the time it was shot. I wholeheartedly disagree.

The stretch of LA and the independent city of West Hollywood between Doheny Drive and the 110 has been giving shelter and safe haven to trans people like me for generations. It still holds a place near and dear to my heart as the most accepting environment I've ever lived in (and I've lived a lot of places). Identity politics aside, like a lot of Angelenos, I actually think Tangerine does a pretty good job portraying the sun-soaked days and florescent nights we all know and love about our city. Also, let's not kid ourselves: Where the movie takes place around Santa Monica and Highland is an epicenter of the LA art world surrounded by film and TV production facilities. It’s no underbelly. Frankly, I think some reviewers made the area out to be an underbelly because it has for so long been an accepting home to the trans community and the film prominently features trans people and people of color living precarious lives onscreen that are outside the whitewashed norm. Sad.

In the iconic language of my Valley girl childhood, my response to all that is two-handed W and a big ol', eye-rolling "whatever." Watch this movie for the beauty of it and the incredible performances by two talented trans actresses diving headlong into what first appear as stock clichés but unfold with an emotional honesty that's positively breathtaking. Along with Rodriguez, Mya Taylor's portrayal of Alexandra is phenomenal. And did you know she was actually roommates with Rodriguez when they were cast?! Maybe that's why it all clicks so well.

Watch it on Amazon Prime Video for $3.99+ (available in SD and HD).

A loving documentary about New York ball culture in the 1980s by groundbreaking lesbian director (and onetime love interest of a friend of mine) Jennie Livingston, this politically astute and profoundly empathetic film does an incredible job portraying the humility and heartbreak of a remarkable group of people finding themselves and each other in an often-hostile world. It remains an important educational and organizing tool for gay and trans folks to this day.

I bet most of you have already seen this so let's discuss what it means now, 31 years since its release.

As Venus Xtravaganza's death late in the movie reminds us, QTPOC lives are often much harder, more precarious, and shorter than they ought to be. Since the film came out, many of the incredible people portrayed in it have also died. AIDS, cancer, diabetes, violence, and other causes we may never even know ended their lives way too soon. Only three — three!!! — are still with us. It didn't have to be that way. And trans people still suffer from disproportionate economic inequality, limited access to competent and affirming medical care, and the consequential effects of others' hatred.

It makes me angry to know that Paris Is Burning is both a relic of its time and a grim reminder of how much still needs to change. This speaks to me very personally; I experienced the sort of violence it touches on in the end of the film, on several occasions, in my teens and early twenties. That was 20 years after this movie came out. What saddens me is knowing for all that’s changed, there’s also all that hasn’t. Trans people — and Black trans women in particular — are still murdered ~all the time~ for no reason other than their existence. If you view it retrospectively (and if you’re committed to progress for trans people, how could you not?), Paris Is Burning raises some troubling questions: How long are we going to have to wait until we're able to live out the lives we deserve? And what are *you* gonna do about it?

Meanwhile, although Livingston did an incredible job and now we have this movie and, y'know...yay for all that, it would likely have been impossible for someone with less cultural capital to pull it off. She's white, grew up in Beverly Hills, graduated from Yale, and started the project as a student at NYU; then, with the help of an editor, she leveraged her initial footage to win funding from the NEA, NYSCA, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Jerome Foundation (all major grant-makers in the arts). I think the real hero here is (maybe) writer, producer, director, and onetime WNYC-TV head Madison Davis Lacy, who seeded the project with $125,000. Why just a "maybe?" Although, according to distributor Miramax, the film ultimately made around $4 million, the people who were portrayed in it were only compensated $55,000 — split 13 ways. Pepper LaBeija spoke out about this in an interview with the New York Times in 1993: "I feel betrayed. When Jennie first came, we were at a ball, in our fantasy, and she threw papers at us. We didn’t read them because we wanted the attention. We loved being filmed. Later, when she did the interviews, she gave us a couple hundred dollars. But she told us that when the film came out, we would be all right. There would be more coming." The "papers" LaBeija is referring to were WNYC-generated model releases, which ultimately derailed the 1991 lawsuit by several people in the movie to secure damages or at least their fair share of the film's profits. (For example, before the releases were uncovered by a lawyer, Paris Dupree was going to sue for $40 million.)

Finally, there's the question of what this film's legacy is and what it should be. It did a lot to bring attention to talented people who deserved it and to mainstream drag, and help its language enter the common lexicon. But are a Madonna song, another Ryan Murphy show, cisgay men, and certain pop stars using phrases like "reading" and "throwing shade" really the legacy the people portrayed in Paris Is Burning deserve? Or, for that matter, is RuPaul's Drag Race's distillation of the resilient strengths of ball culture's chosen families into paltry competition, a refusal to cast out trans people for nine seasons, and offensive absurdities like "you've got she-mail!" the best we can do? No, of course not. But I'll leave it up to you to figure out what should be.

Watch it for free here.

PS, the Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Junior LaBeija on June 11, 2021. Read it here.

Lest you think I "stepped on the ping-pong ball" with this one, I'll say right off I know this movie's neither about LGBTQ folks, nor was it made by anyone out enough for us to know for sure if they were "in the family" (more on that in a moment). It is, however, based on the 1955 bestseller of the same name by Edward Everett Tanner III, a bisexual staple of the 1950s Greenwich Village queer scene who wrote under the pseudonyms Patrick Dennis and Virginia Rowans. And, yes, Rosalind Russell was about as straight and straight-laced as you can get but her rendition of Mame as a resolutely queer woman living for herself is as iconic as it as a whole lot of fun to watch.

What all happens in the movie? It doesn't really matter. It's a gorgeous camp classic, albeit flawed. In a time when affirming LGBTQ media representation was a lot more limited than it is now, this sort of melodramatic fabulousness was appropriated by gay men in particular, who found a balm in such overdramatic construction of femininity for the male gaze. One could look at RuPaul's career and argue that this is still with us. But as far as I can tell, high camp culture has been slowly dying for a while now, as we move away from projecting onto cis/het characters and start making movies by, for, and about ourselves. I once got into an argument with the gay cultural theorist David Halperin over whether or not this represents progress. You can watch and decide for yourself.

Watch it on Amazon Prime Video for $3.99+ (available in SD and HD).

State-sanctioned homophobic and transphobic violence based on Qur'anic interpretations is all too common in many countries with a Muslim majority, where authorities are broadly empowered to surveil, entrap, imprison, torture, and kill LGBTQ people. But even for those who leave for Europe or North America and adopt more openly gay personae, racial profiling and overzealous monitoring (which intensified after the terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, and New York at the beginning of this century) continue to make life difficult. This presents a false imperative that one must walk back from their religion to find freedom from oppression. The people depicted in A Jihad For Love wholeheartedly reject that notion.

This was the first-ever feature-length documentary exploring intersectional issues around Islam and homosexuality, and it does so incredible sincerity and depth. It's also won more awards than I have the space to name and deserved every last one. It was filmed in 12 countries and 9 languages, and its portrayal of people reconciling their faith with the reality of their lives holds lessons on self-determination that are relevant to everybody. The equal attention paid to men and women is also noteworthy, considering how gender-segregated queer cinema tends to be.

But don't watch it for that. Do so because of what it meant for the people involved and director Parvez Sharma's empathetic handling of the delicacies of their individual circumstances. Many of the people in the film chose to remain anonymous, fearing that if they were outed, it could lead to their deaths. Participating in the filmmaking took some real bravery. I think the cause these folks risked their lives for was one as powerful as it is worthwhile: to challenge the idea that homosexuality and Muslim identity are mutually exclusive, and to challenge the West on its prejudice toward Islam. As Sarma told New York magazine shortly before the film's release, "Being gay and Muslim myself, I knew that this film had to be about us all coming out — as Muslims. It's about claiming the Islam that has been denied to us." I think he succeeded.

It's not currently possible to stream the movie in the USA unless you can get access to Kanopy with a public library card. But, you can buy the DVD from Amazon for $17.60.

Three Palestinian women share an apartment in Tel Aviv. Laila (Mouna Hawa) is a big-haired, chain-smoking lawyer with panache and a disdain for convention. Salma (Sana Jammelieh) is a DJ who quits her day job working in food service after being told by her boss that speaking Arabic at work is "unpleasant” (even though she struggles to muster the same kind of courage to come out as gay to her family). And Nur (Shaden Kanboura) has just moved in; a computer science student from a conservative small town, she's shocked by her roommates' freewheeling, drug-using, sexually liberated lifestyles. It’s a scenario that anyone who's tried to build a life for themselves, away from oppression at home, has experienced at some point.

In their own way, each struggles against a man trying to stifle them. Salma’s dad, for example, loves how she's too picky to commit to a husband but then loses it when he finds out why. In the end, it’s part buddy comedy, part #MeToo revenge fantasy (which I won't spoil), but mostly it's a movie about the difficult experience navigating the reality of being a Palestinian woman in Israel. To paraphrase an editorial in Haaretz, the characters suffer under a "double burden": looking for freedom and self-determination, while suffering on the one hand from Israeli discrimination and on the other, the dominance of patriarchy in Palestinian society. It's from this duality that the film gets its name.

Director Maysaloun Hamoud, who is Palestinian and grew up in Beersheba, said the idea for the movie came out of the experiences of her peers, many of whom fled their hometowns to seek freedom in big cities, only to find they aren't really accepted there either. “We will never be considered as equal, so we are in between,” Hamoud told Vogue in 2018. “Out of the society that we came from and not really part of the Israeli society in equal ways in the places we live.”

It’s a story that needs to be told and also I think something that anyone who has tried to build a better life for themselves can relate to.

Watch it on Amazon Prime Video for $2.99+ (available in SD and HD).

Adapted from the 19th-century play Cyrano de Bergerac, this smart and charming coming-of-age tale from gay Taiwanese American director Alice Wu tells the story of three kids growing up in rural Washington. Introverted but articulate A-student Ellie (Leah Lewis) is recruited by inarticulate jock Paul (Daniel Diemer) to write love letters on his behalf to his crush Aster (Alexxis Lemire). Through their letters, Alexis and Ellie/crypto-Paul connect over a shared interest in literature, but Paul's romantic gestures flop because...well, he's no Ellie. The scene where Ellie saves a failing second date by texting Aster as Paul is priceless, the scene where Aster and Ellie finally spend some time together at the hot spring is beautiful, and the relationship that develops between Paul and Ellie's dad over love and sausage-making is really heartwarming.

It's kind of a lesbian and bisexual love story and with a distinctly aromatic twist (which, being aro myself, I quite enjoy). Lewis summed it up pretty well, I think, in her interview with Teen Vogue: "Most people think a love story has an equation and that's usually boy meets girl, girl meets boy, or girl meets girl. [But The Half of It] is a self-love story because these characters don't really end up with each other; but at the very end, they end up with something. For me, that's even more valuable than just finding your other half; it's finding a part of yourself along the way. It is a love story. It's just not a 'romance' story."

It's smart, it's charming, and it's the kind of thing we've waited way too long to see. A.O. Scott called this the best movie of 2020 when it came out. I think you'll agree.

Watch it in Netflix for free with a subscription.

There are a lot of movies about the AIDS epidemic but few take one into the mind of someone suffering from the syndrome with as much immediacy. It is, also, a masterpiece unto itself.

By the time he made this film, at the height of the epidemic, the trailblazing English gay filmmaker Derek Jarman was going blind due to complications from AIDS. At the time of the film's release, he was only able to see in shades of blue. Film is, of course, a deeply visual medium and this movie is something of a filmic essay on Jarman's deteriorating vision and impending death. In spite of his diminishing access to the craft that was his life's work and increasing foreclosure of his future, period, Jarman presents us with a hopeful and resilient commitment to vision, both literally and figuratively.

The film has two parts, intercut with one another. The first narrates the adventures of Blue, a character who is also the color, who gets into fights with other colors while also exploring the wide world. The second narrates Jarman's day-to-day life as a gay Londoner and the complications of living with AIDS. Some events are true and some drift off into the realm of daydreams; and through it all, Jarman contemplates his health and what remains of his life. The film ends with a set of names, repeated — "John. Daniel. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul." — all Jarman's friends and lovers, who died of AIDS.

Movies have the power to transport us to other worlds and into the lives and minds of people we could never meet or dream of being, and here Jarman harnesses that power to do something a little different, rendering his own departing consciousness with a fierce immediacy that's, frankly, unparalleled. When I first encountered the movie, at an exhibition at the New Museum in 2013, I found myself transfixed, and arrested, by the immediacy, humanity, and life the film so powerfully communicates. It was like going into someone’s soul. And if I want you to take anything away from any of the movies on this list, it’s that: an experience of profound empathy, to share in the humanity that ultimately unites us all. It is sometimes joyful, sometimes painful — like our lives, and yours.

Watch it for free with a public library card or university login on Kanopy, or for free with a Fandor subscription on Amazon Prime Video.