The 26 Greatest Queer Movies You Didn't Realize Were Queer

The whole point of Pride Month is that LGBTQIA+ folks have a publicly acknowledged window in which they can loudly and proudly honor their history, and celebrate themselves, their community, and their identities. But not all queer folks have that luxury. Many people have to hide their true selves, either because it's the only way they can remain safe or because they're simply not ready to come out to the world yet. And while there are plenty of queer movies out there, especially in the underground and independent scenes, cinema has largely existed in the closet. Most movies can only be gay in secret, slyly revealing non-heteronormative intentions via sly lines of dialogue and subtext intended for a certain audience (if you know, you know).

So it's time to celebrate those movies. The queer movies that aren't always so explicit about their queerness, the LGBTQIA+ movies that are peeking out from the closet. Some of them are fully aware of their identities, and are just playing coy. Others are just so clearly gay, but haven't come to terms with it yet. But if you're programming a Pride Month marathon, you can't go wrong with these delicious, funny, scary, moving, ridiculous, and powerful films.

Happy Pride. Go watch a queer movie. Start with these. 

The word "bisexual" is never used in Matt Reeves' "The Batman," nor does Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) ever refer to her girlfriend Annika as anything other than her "roommate" (sigh), but Selina's panicked need to rescue Annika from the clutches of Gotham City's gangsters is too intense to be written off as a friendship. In the original DC comics, Selina, aka Catwoman, is canonically bisexual, so it would have been nice if Selina had said out loud that Annika was her proper, romantic lover. Even without it, however, Selina is clearly bisexual. 

She is also attracted to Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson), aka Batman, a gloomy crime-fighter who doesn't seem very good at interacting with other human beings. It's not just that Batman is emotionally distant or wounded — a certain degree of emotional trauma is a traditional part of the conventional Batman origin story — he may also be aromatic/asexual. Batman expresses no interest in women, sex, or anything other than fulfilling his goals. He only bonds with Catwoman when it comes to getting the job done. He is single-minded and unromantic in a way that implies romance is simply not on his radar. 

A lot of modern filmmakers have striven to keep their blockbusters safely within the confines of a PG-13 rating. This typically means that there will be no sex scenes or direct sexual suggestions. The stories of PG-13 movies rob heroes of any sexuality. They are too busy to bone. While the sex-related self-censorship may fulfill an unspoken four-quadrant-pleasing mandate, it also unwittingly created numerous examples of asexual representation. Aro/ace people will likely see themselves in the sexless heroes on the big screen. (Witney Seibold)

Gurinder Chadha's "Bend it Like Beckham" powerfully portrays the coming-of-age experience of the youngest daughter of British Indian Punjabi Sikhs and includes a takedown of the traditional gender roles expected of young women. Now viewed as a feminist teen classic, it's also undeniably sapphic. Jesminder "Jess" Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) and Jules Paxton (Keira Knightley) might be the definition of "just gals bein' pals," because when historians unearth this film in 100 years, they're sure as hell not going to buy them being anything less than in love.

When people mistakenly think Jess and Jules kissed at a bus stop (while also mistaking Jules for a man), Jess responds with "Kissing. Me? A boy? You're mad, you're all bloody mad," which is exactly the way a straight girl talks about smoochin' dudes. (I'm being sarcastic, obviously.) And if that wasn't gay enough, "Bend it Like Beckham" features multiple songs from Mel C. on the soundtrack. That's right, Sporty Spice, the patron saint of baby butches around the globe, is the featured musical stylings of the teen girl soccer movie.

Jules was right when she said "Just because I wear trackies and play sports does not make me a lesbian," because Jules would be a lesbian no matter what she wore or was interested in. Jess and love interest Joe may kiss at the airport at the end of the film, but Jess goes to America to play soccer with Jules, where I can only predict they finally stopped kidding themselves and admitted that they were meant to be together. (BJ Colangelo)

Don Mancini is the only horror creative in history to provide the screenplay for every installment of a slasher franchise and is also the only one to have canonically queer and trans characters while doing it. The first three "Chucky" films were released at a time when explicit queerness was a lot harder to show on screen, but Mancini brilliantly found ways to speak to the LGBTQIA+ experience through subtext.

Andy Barclay's greatest companion is a male doll that he sleeps with every night that quickly tries to ruin his life, and will do anything to gain his approval. If that's not a Baby Gay origin story, I don't know what is. Chucky's biggest scene in "Child's Play II" happens after hiding in a closet as Andy takes up refuge with his masculine-named sister, Kyle. "Child's Play III"? Well, ol' Andy has to go to military school to learn how to be a man, don't ya know? The whole film plays out like an allegory for conversion therapy camps.

Everything about the "Child's Play" franchise has been queer from the very beginning, but as time has gone on, the property has only gotten gayer, campier, and more inclusive. Between the introduction of Glen/Glenda — the non-binary child of killer dolls Chucky and Tiffany — and just about everything Mancini has ever asked actress Jennifer Tilly to do on screen, "Child's Play" has something for everyone under the rainbow. (BJ Colangelo)

"Three pitchers of beer, and you still can't ask. Cut the foreplay and just ask me. No one's watching, what do you care?" Is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) asking the film's narrator (Edward Norton) if he wants to fight, or if he wants to have sex? 

David Fincher's 1999 film "Fight Club" might be one of the most salient criticisms of toxic masculinity to come out of its decade. "Fight Club" looked at a world where males had, after a generation of being "tough," lost their ability to express emotions openly. The narrator could only cry and achieve emotional catharsis by attending self-help groups, feeding off the mourning of others. He also cannot sleep. Something is unfulfilled in his psyche. 

Into his life comes Tyler, a sexy, devil-may-care rebel who offers him a way to bond with other men: physical violence. The men achieve a new, ultra-masculine catharsis by pounding each other in the faces. This kind of physical contact between men is, of course, a substitute for the sexual touch and romantic tenderness they crave. They are so alienated from their emotions, heterosexual fistfights have to stand in for homosexual passion. There are, "Fight Club" asserts, few things gayer than striving toward heteronomative masculinity. And the dialogue is rife with subtext. When looking at the women in his life, a character idly ponders "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need." Perhaps, he might say next, he needs a man in his life. A father figure ... and lover?

"Fight Club" ends with a shot of a penis, a symbol of Tyler Durden's impish sexuality, appearing moments after his ostensible destruction. He lives on, the film says. His aggressive, queer energy is still a part of the narrator. (Witney Seibold)

We lost one of the 20th century's most unique, prolific, shamelessly pulpy, and vocally pro-LGBTQ writers just over a year ago, and many are still mourning the loss of the inimitable Anne Rice. Though she wrote everything from erotic fiction, Christian fiction, historical novels, and memoir, Rice is best remembered for her 13-book Vampire Chronicles series. The first, 1976's "Interview with the Vampire," has lived just about as many afterlives as its iconic central vampire, Lestat. And every one of them is gloriously gay.

The terribly underrated maestro of queer sleaze, Neil Jordan, tapped the novel for a glossy, big-budget adaptation in 1994. One thing that is incredible about Rice's novel is how manifest the queer subtext is. It is in fact simply just text: The centuries-old vampire impresario Lestat falls deeply in love with his tempestuous protege Louis, and Louis falls deeply in love with the French vampire coven leader Armand. Even more incredible is the fact that Jordan sustained the romantic and sexual nature of these relationships in his film, which went on to gross four times its budget, receive two Academy Award nominations, and see Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas play the members of its vampiric love triangle.

In a 2017 interview with The Daily Beast, Rice said, "People told me 'Interview With the Vampire' was a gay allegory, and I was very honored by that." Continuing, "I think I have a gay sensibility and I feel like I'm gay, because I've always transcended gender, and I've always seen love as transcending gender." Amen. And Rice's work — and Jordan's film — transcend time. (Ryan Coleman)

There's no crying in baseball, but there are a lot of hot lesbians. At this point, if you don't understand the queerness of "A League of Their Own," you've either never interacted with a sapphic person in your life or you're willfully playing dumb. The beloved film was recently given a (canceled too soon) series adaptation that put the queer history on front street, but the implicit queerness of the film about the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League cannot be separated because it's embedded in the story's history. Despite Rose O'Donnell being told "Don't do it so gay" while playing Doris, it's impossible to tell a story about queer history and erase the queerness. The script of Penny Marshall's 1992 film might not explicitly call it out, but it's undeniable that "A League of Their Own" is and has always been a queer text.

It was dangerous to be out in 1992 and had the film been true to the history of the Rockford Peaches, it's doubtful that the film would have ever been given the financing to come to fruition. After all, "A League of Their Own" is a story of queer triumph, not trauma, and mainstream Hollywood certainly had no interest in letting lesbians exist on screen unless for the fetishistic gaze of cis straight men or as tragedy porn fodder at the time. Fortunately, the new series took the subtext of the original and made it canonical, honoring queer history in the process. (BJ Colangelo)

"The Matrix" was always an audacious trans allegory, although it understandably took some time for the world to recognize this. Lilly Wachowski has candidly admitted that she and her sister Lana broached the film's message of "transformation" from a "closeted" place, having directed their trailblazing cyberpunk action flick years before either of them came out as trans. But just because the film doesn't announce its queer themes loudly and proudly like the Wachowskis' later mind-bending works, that doesn't mean you can't sense the subtext. It's almost like it's ... a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

Consider our protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves). His nemesis, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), is a shades-sporting sentient program who delights in basically dead-naming Neo, referring to him as "Mr. Anderson" with the same sneering energy as human clown car Ted Cruz snickering about his "pronouns." The very notion of "Mr. Anderson" is a literal construct Neo can only escape by accepting a red pill, recalling the estrogen pills that trans women and transfeminine people take as part of their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) treatment. Once he does, his physical body is then medically transformed, allowing him to fully actualize his authentic self separate from the "mental projection of [his] digital self" The Matrix assigned to him at birth.

Early "Matrix" screenplay drafts made this trans allegory all the more obvious — and yet, even without that, one cannot overlook the Wachowskis' still all-too-radical queer metaphor today. (Sandy Schaefer)

This isn't a universal truism, but generally, the further you go back in Hollywood history, the more complex, subtextual, and symbolic the queer readings become. On its face, the classic Broadways musical adaptation of "My Fair Lady" is as straight as they come. Read heterosexually, the story of an intolerant, withholding older man (Rex Harrison) systematically breaking down a naïve, happy-go-lucky young woman (Audrey Hepburn) and building her back up into the kind of woman he prefers is actually insidious, a story as old as misogyny itself. But "My Fair Lady" is such a strange, deep, and self-conflicted work, that it's virtually impossible to take seriously on its face.

From the jump the production was rainbow-spangled: its director, George Cukor, was the greatest gay film director who ever lived; many believed the play's original author, George Bernard Shaw, was a "repressed homosexual"; star Audrey Hepburn had already appeared in one of the most stunning, explicitly queer films of the post-studio era, "The Children's Hour"; co-star Rex Harrison would go on to star in another, "Staircase."

Harrison is at the center of the film's queer reading, though it's Hepburn who steals every scene. As is made perfectly clear in a new song that was written for the film, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?," Harrison's Henry Higgins, who "lusts" after Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle but lives with a man (Stanley Holloway), seems like he'd much rather simply date that man than laboriously break Eliza down and rebuild her. This is what makes "My Fair Lady" such a fascinating document of the conflicting sexual mores of its time: it's as flagrantly homoerotic as it is misogynistic, and the two, both located in Higgins, are inextricable from one another. (Ryan Coleman)

The nervous, twitchy Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) has just moved in with the studly, confident Dan (Bruce Abbott). They are both medical students at Miskatonic University. One night, Herbert, using an experimental re-agent, brings Dan's dead cat back to life. The undead cat is violent and terrifying. Dan has to kill it again. Herbert explains that his glowing green re-agent can indeed resurrect the dead, but that they turn into mindless, violent zombies. It's taboo, but extraordinary. Surreptitiously, Herbert offers to show Dan that his re-agent will work again. He injects the dead, mutilated cat once again, and it twitches back to life. They are both aghast, but fascinated. This ... this works. And it's amazing. 

Then Dan's fiancée Megan (Barbara Crampton) walks in on the two men experimenting. She is horrified. 

Substitute the injection of a dead cat with queer sexual experimentation, and the scene would play out the same, emotional-beat-for-emotional-beat. Herbert West is hardly an ultra-masculine presence that seems able of seducing Dan, but he is certainly coded queer, an outsider interested in new possibilities that the heteronormative romances around him do not provide. 

"I will not be shackled by the failures of your God," Herbert declares in the sequel, "Bride of Re-Animator." This is an allusion to the "playing God" tropes from most Frankenstein-ian stories, but he also seeks humanity, relationships ... romances? ... outside of what American bigoted Christianity dictates. And Dan? Why does he continue to follow Herbert around? Why is he so fascinated? Surely the "influence" he has on Dan might have a sexual dimension. After all, it's a story of two men who bond over the experiments they conducted in their dorm together. (Witney Seibold)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film "Rope" is as queer as a studio movie of its period can be. Taking inspiration from the real-life murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, "Rope" tells the story of two young men named Phillip (Farley Granger) and Brandon (John Dall) who, merely for an intellectual thrill, murder a classmate. They strangle their victim with a piece of rope and stuff his body in a wooden chest, all before some other friends come over for a dinner party. Hitchcock shot "Rope" to make it look as if it was all one, long continuous take, so we get to see the smugness of the murderers — as well as their panic — more or less in real-time. If they can get away with a "perfect murder," they will be irrefutably superior to the rest of society. 

Although Phillip and Brandon don't ever explicitly mention a sexual or romantic dimension to their relationship — largely taboo in 1948 — their body language, intense friendship, and mutual understanding that they are superior outsiders all point to the possibility of them being engaged in a love affair. If they were forced to live in the closet by a bigoted society, then their murder would be understandable, if not justified. Why tolerate a world that doesn't tolerate us? Our queerness makes us superior. It's simultaneously twisted and empowering.

One needn't dig deep to find the queerness in "Rope." In the 1929 Patrick Hamilton play on which the film is based, Phillip and Brandon were indeed lovers. Arthur Laurents, the film's screenwriter, was a gay man, and Farley Granger was openly bisexual. John Dall was also rumored to be gay, although he never came out in his lifetime. (Witney Seibold)

Brandon Cronenberg's "Possessor" is a brutally violent psychological horror film about personal identity, but it struck a chord with me as a non-binary person who has often longed to live in a different body. The film centers around Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), an assassin who uses special technology to inhabit other people's bodies and use them as her instruments of death. When she first "wakes up" in the body of Colin (Christopher Abbott), she is clearly experiencing a kind of ecstasy. She runs her new hands over Colin's muscles, staring in the mirror and looking both confused and elated at the sensations. Every act she does as Colin gives her a kind of gender euphoria, a comfort she has never known because she felt trapped by her own physical limitations. 

"Possessor" is a devastating tale about the masks we wear, pretending to be one person when in reality we're someone else entirely. For those who have no choice but to mask, like closeted trans people or folks who just haven't figured out their gender yet, Tasya's experience is oddly reassuring. Not all representation has to be positive, after all, and a little queer rage can be cathartic. (Danielle Ryan)

There are lots of movies out there about men who have had it with life for one reason or another and decide to go on a rampage, but what about women? Ridley Scott's 1991 classic "Thelma & Louise" follows Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon), two best friends who end up going on the road trip from hell together after Louise kills a man for attempting to rape Thelma. Along the way, Thelma snags herself a handsome young suitor (Brad Pitt), but the real romance is between the two traveling ladies. Their "straight" lives as wives in a patriarchal world weren't doing them any favors and they ended up choosing one another instead. As they embrace their own happiness and reject the lives they were given, they embrace one another as well. In the end, they choose each other and drive off a cliff with their hands clutched together instead of turning themselves into the police, which is kind of the cinematic equivalent of some newly-in-love lesbians driving off with their U-Haul in tow. 

Thelma and Louise even share a little kiss before they die, though there were plenty of other options for the ending. Thankfully we got the best one, one that highlights the power of sapphic love even in the face of extraordinary challenges. I love these ladies. (Danielle Ryan)

A couple of films on this list nothwithstanding, there just hasn't been much queer representation in modern superhero movies. So you gotta give Sony's "Venom" movies credit for picking up a lot of that slack. Ruben Fleischer's first installment starred Tom Hardy as Eddie, a loner who forms a deeply intimate and confusing bond with an alien symbiote, and the queer-coding on their relationship was anything but subtle. But Andy Serkis's "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" took the series to new heights.

"Let There Be Carnage" isn't just the story of Venom, it's the story of Venom's polycule, with Tom Hardy trying to juggle his romantic feelings for both his ex, Anne (Michelle Williams), and his new live-in partner, Venom. Anne has also merged with Venom and admits that it's a sexual thrill, and Venom cares about Eddie's feelings for Anne, even though her fiancé Dan (Reid Scott) isn't entirely comfortable with the arrangement at first. Dan doesn't get it and he's a little jealous, but he's supportive and a good ally on multiple levels by the end of the film.

The plot of "Let There Be Carnage" finds another symbiote forming a new polycule with serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) and his girlfriend Frances (Naomie Harris), but their undoing isn't their evil plans, it's their jealousy and in-fighting. Our heroes save the day by being respectful, responsible, polyamorous and queer. The Avengers, sadly, would never. (William Bibbiani)