We’re living in a time of brutal backlash against LGBTQ+ rights. Florida and numerous other states have passed laws censoring discussions of queer issues in schools; trans people are facing brutal restrictions on their health care. At the same time, film critics and filmmakers have argued that, as Richard Linklater commented dolefully this summer, “there’s no sex in movies anymore.”
Given these two data points—cultural backlash against LGBTQ+ people and a movie industry that increasingly avoids depictions of adult sexuality—you would think that it would be a dismal time for queer film. And yet, the opposite is the case; 2024 has been an amazing year for queer cinema. There are still certainly limits, as big-budget Hollywood films continue to avoid LGBTQ+ characters and themes. But outside of blockbusters, 2024 has been characterized by the consolidation of decades of gains for LGBTQ+ filmmakers and performers and by a wonderful range of queer movies.
Historically, LGBTQ+ films with any marketing profile at all have been confined to small-budget indie cinema, especially romantic comedies, and family or romantic dramas—movies like Go Fish (1994), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Moonlight (2016). This year saw a number of examples of these kinds of films. Dominic Savage’s intimate, improvisatory Close To You (2023), starring a quietly incandescent Elliot Page as a trans man reconnecting with his family and former girlfriend, got its release this year. So did Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance (2023), a wrenching story about prejudice and violence starring Lily Gladstone as a lesbian Cayuga woman raising her niece and looking for her missing sister. This year’s My Old Ass is a quirky time-travel coming-of-age movie in which the lesbian main character (played by Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza) discovers her bisexuality. And then there’s Queer, Emilia Pérez, and more.
Credit: Greenwich Entertainment
Where 2024 felt like a real advance was in the success and prominence of queer genre films. Queer genre films aren’t new—in the last few years, for example, we’ve seen Julia Ducournau’s queer body horror film Titane (2021) and John Logan’s queer slasher They/Them (2022) as just two examples. This year, though, queer genre films were everywhere. D.W. Waterson’s small-budget indie Backspot (2023) is a sports film featuring Devery Jacobs as a queer, Indigenous cheerleader determined to make it big. There were also not one, but two big lesbian heist films this year with major-name stars. Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s wonderful (and critically underrated) Drive-Away Dolls, featuring Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Pedro Pascal, and Matt Damon, is a retro 90s road-trip farce in which the MacGuffin is a literal dildo. And Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, from A24 with Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, is a brooding magical realist noir about bodybuilding and bad fathers.
A range of films in 2024 which were not necessarily directly about LGBTQ+ people included secondary queer characters or themes. The gay best friend trope is a tired and mostly regressive phenomenon at this point—and one that a lot of recent films refuted or directly challenged. The best example is Jordan Weiss’s unexpectedly wonderful romcom Sweethearts, in which that gay best friend (Caleb Hearon) strolls off the sidelines to have his narrative just about muscle out the supposedly central romance. In Dev Patel’s action-martial arts extravaganza Monkey Man, the climax features the heroic entrance of a fleet of trans women warrior priests. And Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a tennis love triangle that is heterosexual—except for a scene in which the two male protagonists and rivals (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) share a very steamy kiss.
Credit: Universal Studios
All of these films are small- to mid-budget, and many had primarily streaming or hybrid releases. In fact, the flourishing of LGBTQ+ films seems at least in part due to the much-
bemoaned audience fragmentation characteristic of the streaming era, in which every film doesn’t necessarily have to be for everybody, and formerly niche films can find a national audience in places without arthouse cinemas.
Blockbuster big-budget releases, on the other hand, remain notably and embarrassingly leery of centering LGBTQ+ characters or themes. Denis Villeneuve ramped down the homophobia of the source material in Dune: Part Two by removing suggestions that the villainous Baron Harkonnen was queer—but he didn’t include any positive representations of queer people. The Deadpool franchise has included queer characters in the past, and Deadpool himself is pansexual in the comics. Deadpool & Wolverine largely backs away from those possibilities, though, leaving subtext very much sub, and using Deadpool’s canonical bisexuality as an excuse for a series of borderline homophobic punch lines. Most egregiously, executives at Pixar reportedly demanded changes to Inside Out 2 to make the main character “less gay” and play down any tinge of romance between female friends.
The ongoing, quiet explosion of queer cinema is a reminder that we can imagine better things, better selves, and better movies.
Given the flourishing of LGBTQ+ cinema everywhere except the blockbuster, it’s perhaps not surprising that the two most innovative queer films of the year—Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (the latter released in 2022 but only now available for streaming)—are about the relationship between queer people and mainstream media.
The two films are very different; I Saw the TV Glow is a sleek, Lynchian neon nightmare about queer people (over)identifying with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque serial fantasy adventure, while The People’s Joker is a deliberately clunky low-budget pomo bricolage daringly infringing on Warner Brothers’ Batman copyrights. Both, though, are about how queer people find themselves in mainstream media that isn’t necessarily meant for them—and about how mainstream media relies on queer dynamics, buried queer themes, and queer viewers, all of which it denies and represses. Schoenbrun and Drew’s films aren’t really asking “What if Batman and Buffy were queer?” Instead, they’re insisting that we recognize the way in which queer experience is at the heart of the sadness, joy, disempowerment, and empowerment that defines film, mainstream and otherwise.
“What if I was someone else?” asks Owen (Justice Smith), the main character in I Saw the TV Glow. “Someone beautiful and powerful? Buried alive and suffocating to death on the other side of a television screen?” That’s a lovely encapsulation of the way that film (or television) offers us the chance to imagine new selves and new possibilities, whether ecstatic or stifling. And not coincidentally, it’s also an expression of queer despair and hope, of the dream and fear of finding yourself.
The U.S., in many ways, seems bent on becoming more mean-spirited, more repressive, and more homophobic. The ongoing, quiet explosion of queer cinema is a reminder that we can imagine better things, better selves, and better movies.
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