Because the realization of self, and the tacit or direct assertion of that self, is a foundational part of LGBT people’s identity, that process been restaged and reimagined many times in LGBT cinema. (Even in real life, in my experience, it’s hard to get through a first date without eventually arriving at each other’s coming-out stories.) And while so many coming-out films are vital—the tentative reaching of Moonlight, the full-throated embraces of Carol—the sheer amount of them piles up to make an imbalanced kind of portraiture. It’s awfully rare that we get to see, on film, the life that lies past those first forays.
Which is why, in honor of Pride month but really any for any time, I’ve compiled this list of 10 LGBT movies, all available to stream on various subscription services, that aren’t about coming-out or first encounters. The characters in (most of—more on that “most” later) these films have been through those early crucibles, and are now contending with different challenges, curiosities, and passions.
Bessie (2015, HBO Max)
This HBO original movie follows much of the conventional music biopic pattern—the rise, the disillusionment and self-destruction, the tragic fall. But in telling the life story of legendary blues singer Bessie Davis, director Dee Rees is able to subvert some cliché. That’s mostly because Davis was, by most accounts, unapologetically bisexual, a free spirit who happily, unabashedly caroused with women and men alike—which seems almost an impossible anachronism from our rather narrow contemporary understanding of the queer past. Animating Davis’s vivacious, sometimes combative joie de vivre is Queen Latifah, taking a rare lead role and holding the film together with fire and quiet grace. Bessie’s musical numbers are big and brassy, sung powerfully by Latifah and, in at least once scene, Mo’Nique. When Bessie isn’t bringing the house down on stage, Latifah keenly illustrates the tension of her being, her guardedness and her sensitivity, her deep psychic wounds and her forthright mettle. You leave the movie wishing Latifah would star in a lot more movies, and hoping that there will be more complicated studies of important cultural figures whose legacies are often overlooked by white, straight American record keeping.
BPM (2017, Hulu)
Sadly, many queer movies that aren’t about coming out are about AIDS—another defining experience for several generations of people around the world. Some of those movies are sharp and urgent; others are more softly sentimental. What Robin Campillo’s brilliant docudrama does is deftly fuse the two together, the broader political anger and the ragged personal accounting. The film follows a group of young activists in early 1990s Paris as they grieve and protest, getting into granular policy specifics without forgetting the thumping humanity driving its cri de coeur. BPM dares to be as sexy as it is devastating, as lilting and funny as it is furious. Arnaud Valois and the tenacious Nahuel Pérez Biscayart are the fledgling couple at the center of the film, a sweet and sensitively realized relationship caught in the tumult of awful times. But the film’s survey also includes lots of other characters, brave men and women inspired by people Campillo knew in his own ACT UP days. (One supporting character is played by Adèle Haenel, also a star of the exquisite Portrait of a Lady on Fire—which doesn’t quite fit the parameters of this list, but is stunning and also streaming on Hulu.) The spirit of American gay activist Larry Kramer, who recently died, presides over the film, but BPM is not merely a French version of Kramer’s The Normal Heart. (A moving film version of that play, directed by Ryan Murphy, is available on HBO Max.) Campillo adds a palpable texture that is distinctly his, remembering his days at war as a fevered dance through the dark. In all its lament and celebration, BPM is one of the most holistically nourishing films about the AIDS crisis in the gay community. It’s a guide to radical civic action and a tragic love story all bound into one sinuous, mesmerizing movie.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018, Hulu)
As AIDS ravaged New York City in the early 1990s, there was also the weary story of Lee Israel—a celebrity biographer with a gimlet wit who, having found herself on hard times, began forging letters from famous writers and selling them on the collectors’ market. At first glance, the fact that Israel and her ne’er-do-well assistant and drinking buddy Jack Hock were both gay seems incidental to the story. But in director Marielle Heller’s hands (the screenplay is by Jeff Whitty and Nicole Holofcener), Can You Ever Forgive Me? finds a gentle allegory between Israel’s struggles and those of the people around her. The film is a lovely and mournful depiction of a time and place when two gay people past the prime of their lives have begun to sense that their heyday has suddenly, terribly ended. The fine details of that bitter realization are carefully sussed out by a never-better Melissa McCarthy and a woefully dashing Richard E. Grant. Both were nominated for Oscars, as was the screenplay, but Heller’s work and the film as a whole went unrecognized by the Academy. Perhaps the film ultimately seemed too small for that voting body; a shame, because the story it’s telling is, from at least one angle, actually pretty big.
Concussion (2013, Netflix)
Gay men are served plenty of titillation on film, from the rough go in the mud of God’s Own Country to the sleazy, embarrassing Eating Out movies (a series of gay American Pie-esque movies that most gay men in their 30s won’t publicly admit to having watched). But lesbians are not often granted that kind of lurid excitement on film, which is partly why Stacie Passon’s film is notable; it indulges in slightly transgressive lesbian sexual fantasy with a complete lack of a male gaze. It’s also a worthy watch because of its star: the great Robin Weigert, so often a supporting player (and also often cast as dowdy), here takes the lead as a soulful-hot married woman who, unbeknownst to her wife, takes up a secret career as a sex worker and discovers a deep well of sexual prowess previously untapped. Whether or not this film’s politics about the realities of sex work are entirely in the right place—that is not an industry that exists merely to fulfill the curiosities of bored upper-middle-class dilettantes, for example—Concussion still delivers an arresting charge. It’s clever and nuanced in a way that elevates it above the tawdry or exploitative. Passon’s filmmaking is thoughtful and restrained, and works in rich harmony with Weigert’s beguilingly layered performance. Yes, there is a good deal of sex in the movie, so don’t be ashamed if you just want to watch for that. But you’ll also get a lot more than what you came for.
End of the Century (2019, Amazon Prime)
Elliptical and mysterious perhaps to the point of frustration, Argentinian director Lucio Castro’s enigmatic film is refreshing for how it takes the narrative noodling of so many straight romance films—speculative stories like Sliding Doors—and filters it through a gay lens. Juan Barberini and Ramon Pujol play two men who meet on the apps in Barcelona and then, as the film unfolds, realize they may share a deeper connection. I don’t want to give away much more of what End of the Century is about, because the strength of the film is in its surprise, how its reality gently, fluidly shifts. That’s also where some of the consternation sets in—“wait, WHAT happened?” I texted a friend after first seeing the movie—but the film’s obfuscation does not diminish its power. And, hey, the cityscapes are nice to look at, as, yes, are the actors. There’s a note of disquiet and melancholy in End of the Century that I’d have to imagine is in conversation with the film’s title. What exactly that conversation is saying is up to you to decipher. If nothing else, the film will leave you thinking—about chance encounters, about the compromises of long-term romantic attachment, and about what it was like, pre-COVID, to travel and get lost and, maybe, be found.
Happy Together (1997, Criterion Channel)
Speaking of traveling and getting lost: this odd jewel from the sensualist dreamweaver Wong Kar-wai is as much a wistful travelogue as it is about the dissolution of a fraught gay relationship. The film follows two lovers, played by Tony Chiu-Wai Leung and the late Leslie Cheung, as they leave their native Hong Kong to strike out a new life in Buenos Aires. What greets them is nothing great, as the two bicker (and worse) and face the twin burdens of financial hardship and gnawing loneliness—the existential displacement, really—of being far from home. Wong’s visuals are predictably stunning, grimy but glowing in most scenes, chilly but shimmering black-and-white in some others. (The invaluable master Christopher Doyle did the cinematography.) But it’s the emotional tenor conjured by Wong and his actors that really lingers. The story of Yiu-fai and Po-wing is told in jumpy fragments, with a few major plot details happening off-screen. It’s disorienting at first—but once you’ve succumbed to Wong’s spell, Happy Together’s sorrowful dimensions gracefully reveal themselves. The film is a rueful meditation on what it is to have a hunger for the world and all it might clarify about yourself, while home and its familiar comforts ever nag in your memory. That the film was made just as Hong Kong’s own place in the world was shifting—moving from British rule back into the fold of China—is not an accident, I don’t think.
Tangerine (2015, Hulu)
As the film industry both in America and abroad flails, in minor fits and starts, to include the lives of trans people into its purview, a lot of screen time has been spent on transition—often to the dismay of trans audiences. Think of the clunky pandering of The Danish Girl, or the recent controversy of the Belgian film Girl. (Available on Netflix, though I don’t recommend it.) And while Sean Baker’s Tangerine has received its fair share of criticism for its depiction of black trans women scrambling around Los Angeles on one wild day, it is at least not fetishistically fixated on particulars of anatomy or physical transformation. It instead affords its two protagonists, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, the fullness of themselves as they are for their time on screen.
The movie is about a friendship, really, one that provides necessary haven for two women forced to the margins by bigotry and predation. In contrast to that darkness, Tangerine allows in some joyous light; it is often a raucous, fun movie, while still maintaining a close understanding of the danger surrounding these two hustling pals. First-time film actors Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor embody all this complexity with a tireless verve, enlivening the film with humor and, especially in the gorgeous final scene, an enriching poignancy. Tangerine is by no means the end-all, be-all of what cinema about trans lives should be. (It was made by a cis white man, for one.) But in capturing Sin-Dee and Alexandra on something approaching their own terms, it avoids much of the pious didacticism of other recent Issue Movies about a woefully underserved and under-supported group of people. Cinema, and the world at large, need to do a lot better by trans and nonbinary people, primarily by letting them tell their own stories. Tangerine does not do that, but it hopefully has at least encouraged movement toward a brighter, more inclusive future.
Victim (1961, Criterion Channel) and A Very Natural Thing (1974, Amazon Prime)
Basil Dearden’s film Victim was the first English-language film to use the word “homosexual.” Christopher Larkin’s film A Very Natural Thing was, by some accounts, the first film about gay people directed by a gay person to receive a commercial release in the United States. So both movies are notable for marking those milestones. As pure filmmaking, though, I’d say only Victim has survived the decades of upheaval and progress since its release. The film was made in response to British laws criminalizing sexual acts between men, and locates its drama in the tense, nervous mechanics of clandestine activity. It’s about a blackmail scheme targeting men and one semi-closeted lawyer, played by an excellent Dirk Bogarde, as he works to root out the culprits. Because the men involved are living lives in secret, maybe Victim does not exactly fit the rubric of this list. But the secret is, at least, kept from the outside world rather than among themselves. Victim is strikingly compassionate considering its era; it still frames gayness as something illicit, but does not condemn it with moral certitude. It’s a compelling document from nearly 60 years ago, both a reminder of how far things have come and, of course, how far they have not.