Whether you’re out on the town with glitter streaked across your face, or more of an indoor kid hosting salons with your neighborhood gworls, June is the perfect month to consider the ways that queerness and queer community have been featured in film. The month is, after all, not only a chance to bump into your ex at a Pride Parade, but also an opportunity to drag that ex with their new beau to your cluttered apartment—with the candy wrappers strewn across the floor and Criterion Blu-rays sordidly spread on every surface—and force them to engage with the multifaceted history of queer cinema, a great joy of our community’s potential for creative expression.
My book, The Queer Film Guide: 100 Great Movies That Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories, out now from Smith Street Books and Rizzoli, does just that. To be able to share these examples of queer cinema has been a great joy of my life, as it has allowed me to connect with loved ones new and old, and to reflect on how we see ourselves and who we could and want to be. As our community faces the rise of fascism and conservative dogwhistling yet again, perhaps now can be an opportunity to revel in the unrestrained beauty, power, and fury of queerness and creative expression.
Below, some selected excerpts from The Queer Film Guide, for whatever mood you’re in:
If you’re in the mood to continue celebrating AAPI Heritage Month during Pride Month
The Wedding Banquet (1993)
Before Ang Lee changed the face of LGBTQIA+ film in the mainstream with his queer take on the Western with Brokeback Mountain, the Taiwanese filmmaker queered, remixed, and racialized another quintessential American film genre—the screwball comedy—with The Wedding Banquet. And though they seem tangential in connection, the Western and the screwball comedy really invite Lee’s elastic experimentation: they both concern ideas about modernity and tradition, class, gender, race, and society. For Lee’s sophomore feature, he updates the acrobatically talky and innuendo-laden genre, bringing it to modern-day Manhattan and into the lives of a gay mixed-race couple, Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) and Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein).
Wai-Tung’s parents (Gua Ah-leh and Sihung Lung) are always badgering him to get married, and when an opportunity arises to help out one of his tenants – a broke artist named Wei-Wei (May Chin) with Green Card issues—Wai-Tung thinks he can kill two birds with one stone. He does this not realizing that the announcement of a quick (and unbeknownst to them, sham) marriage will encourage his parents to visit and become privy to the life that their son and new wife lead, forcing his relationship with Simon back into the closet. Simon plays roommate and Wai-Tung dons the drag of the good heterosexual son pursuing, in some ways, his parents’ American dream.
The screwball comedy, popular as a subgenre of the romantic comedy – especially during the era of the Hays Code production guidelines for censorship – found sexuality and allure in the unspoken concealed within the overly spoken; due to censorship limitations, that erotic verve came in subtext. Here, Lee and co-screenwriter/producer James Schamus bend the farce and screwball not only to add wrinkles of the cultural nuance of Wai-Tung’s mainlander parents, but for that to be the framework for the tropes of screwball. While the couple live their lives openly in early ’90s New York, the presence of traditional mom and dad incentivize these cinematic/ erotic gestures, nods, and entendres, from who does the cooking to what the implications of going out are. An essential snapshot of how modernity was upending all aspects of life for both East and West, The Wedding Banquet smuggles in observations about the fast pace of globalization in a sparkling comedy of cross-cultural manners.
If you’re in the mood for activism (and partying)
BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017)
Watching BPM (Beats Per Minute) is like a shock to the system. Robin Campillo’s queer drama cuts to the chase from the first scene, placing the audience, in nearly cinéma vérité fashion, in the middle of an action, or a form of protest executed by activist and direct-action groups to call attention to whatever necessities or demands a community is making. The young people who form the Paris chapter of ACT UP—the activist group originally founded in New York to fight for and defend the rights of people with HIV/AIDS—storm the stage, horns blaring, bringing a pharmaceuticals conference to a screeching halt. The spotlight is on them and the straight world, working at a glacial pace to address the epidemic, is looking. Now what?
Based on Campillo and co-writer Philippe Mangeot’s experiences in ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s, BPM never lets that energy of the first scene dissipate. Toggling back and forth between the actions that the group perform, the meetings that they go to organize, and the dance parties they have together, every frame is brimming with life in the face of immense death. If other films about AIDS focus on this latter part, miring its narrative in tragedy, BPM functions as a cunning and beautiful rejoinder that it is exactly the specter of death that invites the people in the community who are most affected to be imbued with irrepressible energy, even as the systems and institutions make it difficult to live a just and equal existence. Every meeting is as heated and energetic as each action at a pharmaceuticals company or a die-in in the street, and each dance party pulsates with joy and intimacy.
As Campillo plunges his audience into a world that’s painfully close to a reality many within the community lived or continue to live, he nestles a love story of politics and passion within it, one between ACT UP newcomer Nathan (Arnaud Valois) and one of the most outspoken members Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). The push and pull of the personal and the political collapses, blending into one another to kinetic effect. In BPM’s most gorgeous sequences, the line between activism, love, and partying fades, music by Bronski Beat thumping, lights throbbing, and every speck of dust in the air reminding us that queerness is political on an atomic level.
If you’re in the mood for Black excellence
Portrait of Jason (1967)
“Jason Holliday was created in San Francisco, and San Francisco is a place to be created.” In a black blazer, a white button-down, thick black-rimmed glasses holding beefy lenses, and the occasional feather boa, Jason Holliday (née Aaron Payne), tells filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the audience the story of his life. The film starts off straightforwardly enough: Jason recounting different parts of his life, told with a jauntiness and a glass in hand, almost every word he speaks spiked with verve and Holliday’s irrepressible laughter. We learn about his experiences as a house boy, as a hustler, as a nightclub act. He is a charming orator and Clarke’s camera is enamored of him. He is ready and willing to perform, to play to his audience, to weave one hell of a tale.
But as the film stretches on Clarke, and her then-partner Carl Lee, goad Jason, ply him with drinks, and manipulate him to uncover the darkness in his life beneath the likable jovialities. The camera goes in and out of focus and the narrowness of the conversation between Jason and Shirley widens its scope, with other crew members chiming in, with Jason calling out to them. The veneer of casual and conventional profile and character study of quaint character starts to spin out of control, with tension and hostility becoming increasingly visceral. Jason’s laughter becomes terrifying and sad. But as Clarke pulls in and out of focus throughout the film, as the hotel room they shoot in curdles from film set to battle arena, the true question of this film—besides identity construction and persona crafting—becomes clear: it’s one of power in the context of storytelling.
Atlhough Shirley may be holding the camera and she and her crew may be supplying Jason with drinks and have the opportunity to wipe off the facade of his seemingly unidimensional joy, there’s a way in which Jason’s ability to tell his story and speak his truth about his life as a Black gay man, even through a kind of uncomfortable puppeteering, is a kind of power in its own right. The illusions that Clarke is intent on framing Holliday with ultimately don’t matter, nor does the fabulism the film is interested in, because Jason is almost through his memoirs, and he’s here.
If you’re in the mood for staring in the mirror, contemplating your own desires
Spa Night (2016)
In the haze of the steam room or off the rippled reflection of the water, perhaps you can see that David (Joe Seo) is on the edge. He mops the floors, refills the soap, restocks the towels. He cleans the space where others clean themselves, yet there’s still something stuck to him. With the burden of trying to go to college, helping his first-generation Korean immigrant parents after their restaurant closes down, and becoming a man on his own terms, David is at a crossroads as to who he wants to be. While his studies languish, he works out in his room, does pushups on the floor, and then takes selfies in his cramped bathroom, trying to will himself into being desirable and pulling at the threads of his masculinity.
Writer/director Andrew Ahn’s debut feature film is a stunner, deliberate and carefully executed to excavate the interiority of its lead, someone whose ambivalence and uncertainty is bone deep. Its plot machinations are subtle and quotidian, and yet each event and action unlocks something else frightening and fascinating about David: about how he sees others and how he sees himself. When he visits his childhood friend at USC, he’s confronted with their brand of machismo, and he mirrors it uncannily, imperfectly. When he takes a cleaning job at one of Los Angeles’ Koreatown’s many spas and uncovers the concealed world of male cruising, he must then look himself in the mirror; not just as the object in a digital self-portrait, not just someone whose selfhood is wrapped up in Korean American notions of family, but as a person becoming themself.
Every moment Ahn captures lingers like the steam that clings to a glass door, rendering square ideas and feelings opaque, its sensations and emotions gluing themselves to one’s memory. Connection is tenuous for David, not only with other people, but crucially with himself: through Ahn and cinematographer Ki Jin Kim’s camera, David’s reflection becomes something that isn’t just a fact, but another part of himself that he must negotiate a relationship with. The filmmaker both submerges the viewer in a specificity of perspective, while also documenting the impact each movement, thought, and action has on its lead’s sense of self, culminating in a work that quavers in beauty and loneliness.
If you’re in the mood for history
Gay USA (1977)
From conversations about the fight for equal rights to debates about abortion access, Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s incredible documentary Gay USA feels as fresh and incisive in its observations about the landscape of civil rights and celebration as it did when it was made. The film was shot on a single day, June 26, 1977, and simultaneously at several different gay Pride parades across the country, from New York to Los Angeles, by 25 camera crews, under the coordination of the filmmaker. Gay USA is a tremendous landmark of gay rights as it was still evolving, on the ground and from the perspective of people who were courageous enough to be there.
Bressan Jr. is one of queer cinema’s most important, but perhaps most overlooked, filmmakers. He was capable of making potent gay political work that documented a post-Stonewall and pre-New Queer Cinema defiance, like Gay USA and Buddies (released in 1985, shortly before the director’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1987, and widely cited as the first feature film to deal with the AIDS epidemic), as well as sensual pornographic films that are wrought with melancholy and yearning, like Passing Strangers (1974) and Forbidden Letters (1979). Bressan Jr.’s work is invaluable in both film and queer history. And often, as in Passing Strangers, the erotic and the political overlap and become entwined.
Gay USA is a time capsule of a moment before gay rights went mainstream enough for corporations to take notice of the LGBTQIA+ community as a precious market demographic and Pride floats were sponsored by Halliburton. At the same time, it is astonishingly modern, in both its vérité and direct cinema techniques (switching back and forth between observing the parades and being a part of it), as well as its ceaselessly relevant discussions about LGBTQIA+ people in society, discrimination, religion in politics, and the Cerberus-like problem of well-funded homophobic political campaigns, particularly from the Save Our Children coalition and soon-to-be-pie-faced Anita Bryant. But what makes Bressan Jr.’s film such a gem and an essential piece to behold is the thrill and joy of queer people together in solidarity and something that looks like pride.
If you’re in the mood for gay porn (that’s also art)
Boys in the Sand (1971)
“Why can’t someone make a pretty pornographic film?” Wakefield Poole, the Broadway dancer turned gay porno auteur, once asked himself after he and his friends saw a lousy dirty movie in 1970. And so, in an effort to fix this little quandary, Poole, his lover Peter Fisk, and his friends set out to Fire Island, the gay enclave that sits on a thin strip of land along Long Island, New York, and made what would become Boys in the Sand, released a few days after Christmas in 1971. Amongst the lush greenery and warmth of Cherry Grove, Boys in the Sand operated in the wider culture not dissimilarly to how Grindr eventually paved the way for Tinder: Poole’s film set the blueprint for the kind of “porno chic” movies that—like Deep Throat after it in 1972—would become cool to see, to talk about, to engage with.
The timing of Boys in the Sand seems to fit—both in terms of the changing nature of the ratings system by the Motion Picture Association of America replacing the Hays Code production guidelines for censorship in 1968, and the rapid evolution in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights following the Stonewall uprising. These social and cultural changes made it possible for films like Boys in the Sand, and Poole’s subsequent filmography, to be both subcultural hits as well as embrace an aesthetic that didn’t concern tourists but didn’t push them away.
Divided into three segments—“Bayside,” “Poolside,” and “Inside”—Poole’s film, forgive the cliché, makes Fire Island another character in the film. For Poole, it was important that the film take on a naturalistic quality, that it was shorn of the contrivances a lot of dirty movies that he, his lover, and his friends would see. In Boys in the Sand the onscreen partners—bearded Peter and nubile Donovan—find natural charm with one another, move about the sand feeling not only each other’s bodies but the grains too. In one segment, light pushes its way through leaves, the palette golden and green; in another segment by the pool, it’s scorched and hypnotic, the contrast between blue and saffron like water and fire; and in the final segment, a twist on the repairman trope, it’s seductive and moody. For Poole, even as he plays with montage and unusual angles that prioritize aesthetic over explicitness, there’s nothing dirtier than real atmosphere and chemistry.
If you’re in the mood for gay friendship
Parting Glances (1986)
They don’t tell you this in the movies, but house parties in New York are just theater spaces where everyone is playing the role of a better or happier version of themselves, or the kind of person they’d like to be. In one of the great and most underrated house party films of all time, Parting Glances, Michael (Richard Ganoung) and Robert (John Bolger), who have been together for nearly six years, are playing the part of a happy couple on the eve of Robert’s departure for a work relocation somewhere in Africa. It’s not that they’re not happy; on the contrary, Bill Sherwood depicts the couple as normal, perhaps a little bourgeois. But the impending parting forces the two to realize how their relationship has changed.
Nick (Steve Buscemi), a musician and opera queen, is playing two parts; someone who’s doing better than he is, and someone who will briefly tolerate the sympathy doled out to him by guests. Nick, Michael’s sardonic ex-boyfriend and best friend, has AIDS and, were it not for Michael, he’d stay in bed all day listening to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. But, as he feels the clock on his life ticking, he gets up and goes out.
Released in 1986, only five years after the New York Times had published the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances is one of the earliest and most significant films to address the AIDS epidemic, but it does so clear-eyed and wittily. Nick isn’t wispy and waiting for death, he’s caustic and funny, archly making a video will and blasting opera to annoy the neighbors. The film isn’t glib either, letting Nick’s friends contemplate what they’re going to do, and what their personal and professional lives will be like when he’s gone. This question means the most to Michael, who mulls over the question with his friend (and party host) Joan (Kathy Kinney). Michael takes care of Nick, and the two share a magnetic bond.
Sherwood, who died of AIDS complications at the age of 37 in 1990, has a sharp ear for the kind of conversations one finds (or gets trapped in) at parties in New York. And better yet, he avoids sentimentality, instead presenting a nuanced comedy of 24 hours in these people’s world. Parting Glances is a film that paints a reality of the AIDS crisis; that it was in people’s lives but that it didn’t stop them.
If you’re in the mood to “be gay, do crime”
Set It Off (1996)
After being fired from her bank teller job on racist grounds and in the wake of her bank being robbed, Frankie (Vivica A. Fox) starts working at a tedious janitorial job with some of her closest friends in her neighborhood: ambitious Stony (Jada Pinkett), young and spritely T.T. (Kimberly Elise), and fiery Cleo (Queen Latifah). The four of them are exhausted, their jobs low-paying and their futures uncertain, until a casual mention from Cleo to rob a bank begins to feel like one of their last options. Their plan becomes solidified after yet another turn of tragic events, first for Stony and then for T.T. But things become complicated when Stony develops a relationship with Keith (Blair Underwood), the manager of the bank they’re planning to rob.
F. Gary Gray’s heist drama Set It Off is populated by a cast of characters who live under the thumb of a racist capitalist system designed to keep them struggling. If bank robbery films have historically engaged with social and political subtext, with characters looking for ways out of their current situations, Set It Off brings those ideas to the fore, arguably working as a meta-fantasy. As they knock banks one by one—even as Stony and Keith become closer—Gray foregrounds the world, blinded by the sun, with the awareness of similar movies that have come before, from John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) to Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and that maybe these characters have seen them, too.
The real pistol in the ensemble is Latifah’s Cleo, a bombastic force of nature, and a lesbian armed with the confidence to pull these bank jobs off. Gray and screenwriters Takashi Bufford and Kate Lanier make her the knife point on which the success of their heists are balanced: sharp enough to hold no prisoners, but cocky enough to send it all to hell. As the women, whose friendship could be torn apart by money, try to find freedom through spectacular danger, their love for one another is what’s priceless.
If you’re in the mood for kinky relationships (that have the same problems as everyone else’s)
The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
British filmmaker Peter Strickland plays games of the senses, especially sound. In Berberian Sound Studio (2012), a foley/sound effects artist for film starts to lose his mind as he assembles the effects track for a horror movie; for In Fabric (2018), a killer dress’ silken texture comes alive in a symphony of consumerist absurdity; and his more recent film Flux Gourmet (2022) is about a performance art collective that blends food and sound. Enamored of the analog days of exploitation films (especially of the 1960s and 1970s), Strickland pushes his form to the limits. But it’s The Duke of Burgundy where his games are their most brilliant and emotionally charged, eroticism given an orchestral maximalism.
Under the lepidopterological (the study of moths and butterflies) tutelage of Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) spends most of her time playing (romantic/sexual) servant to her: cleaning her house, her boots, her undergarments. She is told what to do and when to do it. And when she disobeys, punishment follows. But in this dominant/submissive relationship, as in many, it’s the sub who holds the key. In reality, it’s Cynthia who is following orders and, desperate for love and weary of the games, plays the role of dom to maintain closeness with Evelyn. As the two become more emotionally restless within their roles, their delicately balanced power dynamics become more precarious.
The Duke of Burgundy is subversive, not for its frank portrayal of a consensual dom/sub romance, but for the layered emotional honesty that is used to explore Cynthia and Evelyn’s affair. Theirs is ultimately not that much different from anyone else’s: someone’s needs being or not being met, someone’s insecurity getting in the way of intimacy, and no one communicating the way they ought to. Strickland expertly uses image and sound to find the extremes in the relationship, ramping up the kaleidoscopic visuals and cacophonic sounds to convey ecstasy or scaling them back to articulate absence and longing. Sumptuously designed by Pater Sparrow with a stunning use of sound by a team led by Martin Pavey and splendorous cinematography by Nic Knowland, The Duke of Burgundy is an erotic, romantic, and beautiful ode to the butterfly-wing fragility of love.
If you’re in the mood for weird vibes about masculinity and postcolonial theory to the sounds of Corona
Beau Travail (1999)
Distilling the experience of losing yourself in a dance, in a club, in the dark of night, is one of the best and most satisfying things a film can do. But what about when you can’t lose yourself, when you’re actually only of yourself—both unable to get in touch with it and get away from it? This idea takes on the weight of geopolitical and transnational themes in Claire Denis’ mesmerizing Beau Travail, a memory of obsession, loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, about a French Legionnaire Officer in Djibouti who becomes psychologically entwined when a new officer arrives. The film opens with the two officers, Adjudant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant) and Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), circling around women dancing, like they would prey. Is it the women they’re hunting, or is it each other?
Galoup sits writing in Marseilles, the film breaking its topographic logic away from Djibouti, and he says about himself, “My story is simple… Unfit for life. Unfit for civil life.” Galoup knows his place. He watches over his men as they prepare for something that’s never to transpire, or what has already transpired. Abandoned tanks line the rocky terrain. Denis shoots these sequences in the empty buildings and the makeshift assault courses, the sun scorching the earth and rendering everything in its sight burnt, unforgiving amber. Denis lines the cracks of Beau Travail with an intensity that reflects its geographical and thematic scars, these psychological, erotic, and political wounds self-inflicted.
That strain of masochism runs deep in Galoup, too—Lavan’s face panther-like, rugged and rough-hewn, matching the texture of the desolate buildings he oversees as training grounds. His stare pierces through the heat and is unmatched in his group – well, until Gilles arrives: slender, statuesque, smooth where Galoup is hard. He’s the only one who can match Galoup for every stare, his unfazed demeanor sending the officer into a tailspin. They are nearly mirror images of one another, but Galoup seems to see in Gilles a beauty that contrasts with his bluntness. In hypnotic glances and stares, we see men together; we feel their musculature, the homoeroticism of an army forming a semblance of nationhood, and a national identity that starts to come undone, only to explode in an unforgettable dance finale set to Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night.”
