A history of LGBTQ+ representation in film

Also known as "The Gay Brothers," this short film showed two men dancing together. Film critic Parker Tyler noted that the dance "shocked audiences with its subversion of conventional male behavior."

Prior to Hollywood's Hays Code—which prohibited for decades positive depictions of queerness, among other things—films often used gender-role-reversal scenarios for humor. An especially prominent example of this "cross-dressing" comedy phenomenon is Charlie Chaplin's 1915 two-reel "A Woman." The story sees him transforming into a woman to toy with two men's affections, and Chaplin's character eventually tricks them into kissing each other.

In this Charlie Chaplin comedy, a stagehand mocks the actor's character for supposedly kissing another man. He suddenly acts twee and provocatively sticks his butt out in a parody of the stereotypical "sissy," or effeminate queer man.

The German film "Anders als die Andern" (English: "Different from the Others") is one of the oldest surviving movies with a gay protagonist and was made during a rare period when German film censorship was relaxed after World War I. It centers on a violinist who takes his life after getting blackmailed for his sexuality and ends with an appeal for gay tolerance by German gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld.

The moment occurs during an orgy scene in the silent Cecil B. DeMille film. "Manslaughter" is about Lydia (Leatrice Joy), a society girl who is prosecuted by her fiancé after accidentally causing a policeman's death.

Charles Bryant's adaptation of gay writer Oscar Wilde's play of the same name reportedly featured several queer collaborators—namely, bisexual lead actor Alla Nazimova and set designer Natacha Rambova (her rumored lover). The movie drew controversy from New York censors for suggesting that two of its male characters were gay. Additionally, several female courtiers in the film were actually men in drag.

The silent war film "Wings" was the first movie to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards and also depicted one of the earliest onscreen same-sex kisses. In one scene, a young soldier tenderly kisses his dying friend on the mouth, which was a common practice in the trenches of World War I.

According to Vito Russo's 1981 book "The Celluloid Closet," the film contains "probably the first explicitly drawn lesbian character" in cinematic history. "Pandora's Box" follows Lulu (Louise Brooks), a woman whose sexual appeal leads to lust and violence in the people around her. Actor Alice Roberts played her lesbian admirer, Countess Geschwitz.

In "Morocco," cabaret singer Amy Jolly (depicted by bisexual actor Marlene Dietrich) caused a stir when—after singing a number dressed in a full suit and top hat—she kissed a woman in the audience on the lips. The scene made her the first lead actor to kiss another woman on screen.

Leontine Sagan's groundbreaking German drama "Mädchen in Uniform," in which a young schoolgirl falls in love with one of her female teachers, has been heralded as the first explicitly lesbian movie. Nazis later tried to destroy every copy of the film because of its queer content and anti-authoritarian themes, but it ultimately survived.

MGM producer Irving Thalberg was reportedly a fan of "Mädchen in Uniform" and believed that a similar film about the life of real-life, 17th-century lesbian monarch Queen Christina of Sweden "could give us very interesting scenes." MGM ended up giving Christina (played by queer actor Greta Garbo) a heterosexual love interest and erased explicit mention of her sexuality, but bits of historical truth remain. Christina kisses and flirts with her lady-in-waiting in the film and declares, "I shall die a bachelor!"

Officially known as the "Motion Picture Production Code," the Hays Code set stern guidelines for what types of content could be released by U.S. movie studios from 1934 to 1968. One taboo was homosexuality, meaning that any instances of queerness on film had to be carefully coded.

[Pictured: American Joseph Breen, Hollywood director, speaking with British director Michael Balcon and others. For many years Breen was an administrator of the Production Code, the American censorship body, governed by the "Hays Office."]

In one scene from the 1938 screwball comedy "Bringing Up Baby," the word "gay" was used in a queer context for likely the first time (possibly thanks to queer performers' use of "gay" as a slang term). When a woman asks reputedly bisexual actor Cary Grant's character why he's wearing a feathery bathrobe, he responds, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!"

"For all its efforts, the Production Code didn't erase homosexuals from the screen; it just made them harder to find," "The Celluloid Closet" states. "And now they had a new identity—as cold-blooded villains."

Early examples of queer-coded villains include the titular antagonist of "Dracula's Daughter" and Mrs. Danvers in "Rebecca," but an especially interesting case is Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in "The Maltese Falcon." Although Joel's queerness is explicitly stated in the film's source material, it's only hinted at in the movie through his effeminate behavior and love of perfume.

Loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" tells the story of two heavily coded gay men who murder one of their classmates for the sheer thrill of it. Hitchcock had a habit of exploring the associations between sexual and gender "deviance" and crime during the Hays era, also including queer-coded characters in "Rebecca," "Strangers on a Train," and "Psycho."

Jacqueline Audry's French drama "Pit of Loneliness" (originally named "Olivia") was one of the few 1950s films that explored and included lesbian themes. It takes place at an all-girls boarding school, where two female teachers compete with one another for their students' affections. The movie was also notable as one of the few movies in decades that was written, directed, and performed entirely by women.

The well-known drama includes clear, coded gay subtext between troublemaking teen protagonist Jim Stark (portrayed by supposedly queer actor James Dean) and his new classmate, Plato (Sal Mineo). Mineo was one of the first Hollywood actors to publicly come out as gay, and he later even referred to Plato as the first gay teenager on film.

"Victim" opens in 1960s London, where a man's death leads the film's gay main character (Dirk Bogarde) to discover a blackmail scheme against several gay men. Homosexual relations between consenting adults were illegal in England and Wales until 1967, making the film a radical cry against British homophobia.

Well-known actors Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine starred in this adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play, "The Children's Hour." In the film, a rebellious student accuses two teachers of being in a taboo lesbian relationship, and the teacher who actually is a lesbian eventually meets a tragic end. While "The Children's Hour" is notable for presenting a sympathetic queer main character in a time when that was rare, it has also been criticized for reinforcing the "tragic gay ending" stereotype.

"Portrait of Jason" was shot over 12 hours, as experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke interviewed Jason Holliday, a Black gay sex worker and aspiring cabaret dancer. Although one could argue that such a grueling interview process was exploitative, Holliday's musings about his life, dreams, and art in the face of societal anti-Blackness and homophobia provide the kind of intersectional look at LGBTQ+ identity that '60s media sorely lacked.

Produced during the final months of the Hays Code, Robert Aldrich's film about the breakdown of an aging lesbian TV actor included a lesbian sex scene that broke down a major taboo associated with the Code's erasure of gay characters on screen. The movie received an "X" rating under the new Hollywood rating system.

The code began to wane and loosen over the years. By the 1960s, society's "sexual revolution" left audiences more open to supposedly "vulgar" topics. In 1968, the Hays Code was officially replaced by the new Motion Picture Association film rating system.

[Pictured: President of the Motion Picture Association of America Jack Valenti, Dec. 17, 1968.]

"Funeral Parade of Roses" retells the "Oedipus Rex" myth within Tokyo's underground gay scene of the 1960s, following a young trans woman named Eddie. Writer-director Toshio Matsumoto's Japanese drama combines experimental film techniques with several genres, such as sexploitation movies and melodramas.

Originally an Off-Broadway play by Mart Crowley, the film explores the underlying tensions that surface when a friendly group of gay New Yorkers gathers for a birthday party. The film's intimate focus on the relationships between multiple gay characters was unprecedented at the time.

For decades, queer artists utilized "camp"—literally defined as a "deliberately exaggerated and theatrical behavior or style"—to rebel against the repressive, "ordinary" standards of society. However, Waters challenged the concept of camp by making deliberately filthy, transgressive films that let their queer, outcast characters gleefully behave badly. The most notorious example is 1972's "Pink Flamingos," in which famous drag queen Divine plays a woman who, along with her family, competes with a Baltimore couple to be named the "filthiest people alive."  

Sidney Lumet's award-winning crime drama "Dog Day Afternoon" is based on a real bank robbery by a man attempting to pay for his partner's gender affirmation surgery. Cisgender actor Chris Sarandon received an Oscar nomination for playing trans woman Leon, one of the few mainstream trans film characters of the time. In doing so, he became part of a larger, criticized trend of cis actors being recognized for playing trans roles.

While queer camp had long been used as a form of self-expression by the LGBTQ+ community in response to a heteronormative, oppressive society, it arguably reached its peak with the 1975 musical "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." In the cult classic, two naive newlyweds seek help from the inhabitants of a creepy castle when their car breaks down nearby, and a romp of murder, cannibalism, and bisexuality ensue. Led by Tim Curry as the pansexual, trans scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter, "Rocky Horror" has become one of the most popular "midnight movies" of all time.

"Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives" comprised interviews with 26 lesbians and gay men who spoke about their lives and experiences as part of the LGBTQ+ community. At the time, the French documentary's positive, nuanced depictions of queer people in their own words were rare in the film industry.

[Pictured: Director of "Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives," Lucy Massie Phenix.]

Although the LGBTQ+ community slowly became more accepted in the 1960s and 1970s (albeit as tragic figures in media), a slew of new film releases at the dawn of the 1980s showed queer people in another negative light. The most notable was "Cruising," a film in which an undercover cop searches for a serial killer who has been targeting members of the gay S&M leather community. William Friedkin's "Cruising" was reviled by many gay viewers, with one pamphlet saying that, in the film, "gay men are presented as one-dimensional sex-crazed lunatics … It is a film about why we should be killed."

Gay screenwriter Barry Sandler decided to write a script about a married man who realizes he's gay and falls in love with another man in an effort to make up for the many negative gay film stereotypes from previous decades. The film became 1982's "Making Love," and according to Sandler, it was meant to be "the first mainstream Hollywood film to deal with the subject of homosexuality in a positive way, offering positive role models."

The horror film features an erotic love triangle between a doctor, played by Susan Sarandon, and a vampire couple played by Catherine Deneuve and queer superstar David Bowie. "The Hunger" quickly grew a dedicated fan following, partly because of the lesbian sex scene between Deneuve's and Sarandon's characters.

Donna Deitch's "Desert Hearts" tracks the romance that develops between repressed English professor Vivian and free-spirited rancher's daughter Kay. It's regarded as the first mainstream lesbian film with a happy ending.

Gay first-time director Bill Sherwood's "Parting Glances" is regarded as the first film to deal with the AIDS crisis, which had a devastating impact on gay and bisexual men in particular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sherwood died from the disease before he could make more films, but "Parting Glances" remains a historic work of LGBTQ+ cinema.

Jennie Livingston's acclaimed documentary chronicles New York City's Black and Latino Harlem drag ball scene of the late 1980s, bringing the vital subculture into the public eye in a major way. Prolific drag queens, trans women, and voguers like Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper Labeija, and Willi Ninja were interviewed for "Paris Is Burning," although the film faced controversy when its subjects initially received little compensation.

In the early 1990s, several openly gay directors became involved in independent cinema, creating a crop of queer movies that treated sexuality as fluid—examples include "Orlando," "My Own Private Idaho," "Poison," and many more. Academic B. Ruby Rich coined the term "New Queer Cinema" in Sight & Sound magazine to describe this burgeoning film movement.

A-list actor Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his portrayal of a lawyer who's fired for having AIDS in Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia," helping to dispel the myth that taking on LGBTQ+ roles would ruin straight actors' careers. "Philadelphia" was also the first major Hollywood film to focus on the AIDS epidemic.

Based on Vito Russo's 1981 book of the same name, "The Celluloid Closet" brought together queer film historians, creatives, and their peers to examine the history of LGBTQ+ visibility on the big screen, from the early days of film through coded characters and harmful queer stereotypes and up to the emerging New Queer Cinema movement.

Starring major Hollywood actors like Patrick Swayze, John Leguizamo, and Wesley Snipes as drag queens, "To Wong Foo" was the rare, explicitly gay studio film that rose to the top of the box office during its first two weeks in theaters. The film followed the success of the 1994 arthouse film "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," an Australian comedy about two drag queens and a trans woman.

Director Cheryl Dunye's feature-length directorial debut follows Cheryl (Dunye, playing a fictionalized version of herself), a Black lesbian filmmaker working on a project about "The Watermelon Woman," an obscure 1940s Black actor.

Hilary Swank, a cisgender actor, won an Oscar for her portrayal of real-life trans teenager Brandon Teena, who was murdered in 1993. "Boys Don't Cry" is undoubtedly bleak, but Kimberly Peirce's film made Teena's story and modern trans American experiences more visible.

Gay director Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most acclaimed and prolific Spanish filmmakers in history. After years of telling bold stories featuring gay and trans characters, his film "All About My Mother," which follows a woman who reconnects with her ex-partner (a trans woman) won Best Foreign Language Film at the 2000 Academy Awards.

Ang Lee's film about the long-term secret romance between two cowboys (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) made history as one of the first big mainstream movies that centered on a gay love story. The film became a critical and box office success and won three Oscars, proving to Hollywood that LGBTQ+ stories had a place outside of strictly independent filmmaking.

Through "The Kids Are All Right," director Lisa Cholodenko made history as one of the earliest openly lesbian directors whose film received a Best Picture nomination. The dramedy revolves around a lesbian couple whose life with their two teenage children is disrupted when the kids meet their mom's sperm donor.

Lesbian filmmaker Dee Rees arrived on the scene with her 2011 debut narrative feature film, "Pariah." The semi-autobiographical film centers on a Black Brooklyn lesbian's experiences with coming out and reckoning with her identity. It went on to be recognized at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the GLAAD Media Awards, cementing Rees as an exciting voice in queer filmmaking.

Abdellatif Kechiche's coming-of-age drama about a young woman who finds herself through a lesbian romance took home the prestigious Cannes Film Festival's top prize and went on to receive Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. However, the film has faced long-running controversy—particularly from lesbians and other queer women viewers—for its voyeuristic male gaze and the lead actors' descriptions of Kechiche's "horrible" shooting conditions.

Sean Baker's 2015 dramedy "Tangerine" follows Sin-Dee (Rodriguez), a sex worker who, with the help of her best friend, Alexandra (Taylor), sets out to get revenge on her cheating boyfriend on Christmas Day. "Tangerine" is a rare film that stars multiple trans women of color played by trans actors of color. Distributor Magnolia Pictures' Academy Award campaigns for Rodriguez and Taylor marked the first time that a film producer openly supported the nomination of trans actors.

Although "La La Land" was infamously accidentally announced as the Best Picture winner at the 2017 Academy Awards; the prize actually went to Barry Jenkins' "Moonlight." The film tells the story of a young Black gay man named Chiron as he grows up and comes to terms with his identity. It made history as the first LGBTQ+ movie and the first movie with an all-Black cast to take home the top prize.

The Chilean drama "A Fantastic Woman" centers on Marina (Daniela Vega), a trans singer who fights to work through her grief after the sudden death of her boyfriend. When Vega appeared onstage at the 2018 Oscars, she made history as the first openly trans person to present at the awards ceremony. "A Fantastic Woman" went on to become the first Chilean movie to win an Academy Award.

Based on bisexual author Becky Albertalli's book "Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda," the film follows a closeted high schooler who falls for an anonymous gay classmate with whom he's been speaking online. "Love, Simon" is regarded as the first movie by a major Hollywood studio to feature a gay lead character.

Director Wanuri Kahiu's "afro bubblegum" film "Rafiki," which tells a love story between two teenage girls, became the first Kenyan film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie was banned in its home country, where homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Kahiu sued the Kenya Film Classification as a result, and the ban was temporarily lifted so that "Rafiki" could screen for seven days in its home country and qualify for Oscar consideration.

LGBTQ+ media advocacy organization GLAAD puts out a yearly report on queer representation in media, and its 2019 report showed hopeful signs that media is becoming more inclusive, with a record number of gay characters on screen. Yet, the overall trend is dampened when broken down by race: It was only a record year for white queer people.

Queer characters of color actually decreased, and there were virtually no trans characters. Still, anyone who watched a lot of films in 2019 saw an encouraging breadth of queer characters and storylines, as depicted in "Booksmart," "Rocketman," "Blockers,"  "Love, Simon," "Pain and Glory," "Portrait of a Lady on Fire," "Pain and Glory,"  "And Then We Danced," "End of the Century," "Wild Nights With Emily," and more.

In the children's movie "The Mitchells vs. the Machines," main character Katie, on the cusp of leaving home for college, feels misunderstood and at odds with her parents. Mostly because they don't understand her surreal YouTube videos and desire to go to film school, but there's a subtler indication that her queerness contributes to the tension between her and her parents. The end confirms her queer identity when, finally at college, Katie's new girlfriend is casually mentioned over a video call with her parents. The character is voiced by Abbi Jacobson, who is bisexual, making Katie a rare queer character also played by a queer actor. It's a small but notable shift that mainstream children's media—once off-limits for discussion of anything risk-averse studios fear could jeopardize profits—is slowly becoming more inclusive of LGBTQ+ characters.

In "Bros," Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane star as two men navigating the early, uncertain stages of a relationship. The film, co-written by Eichner, flew mostly under the radar, likely because it underperformed at the box office after premiering in August 2022. However, the Universal Pictures release marked the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio, and, notably, featured an almost entirely LGBTQ+ cast, with all top-billed roles going to out actors. 

Additional writing by Cu Fleshman.