A curated guide to the LGBTQ+ films that defined a generation, plus the upcoming releases rewriting what queer stories can look like on screen.

Queer cinema has never been louder, stranger, or more itself. What began as a handful of coded subtext and stolen moments has grown into a full genre with its own vocabulary, its own auteurs, and its own increasingly crowded awards season conversation.

The films below span decades, tones, and budgets. Some won Oscars. One was shot on an iPhone. Another is still weeks away from its theatrical release. What they share is a refusal to treat queer life as a footnote.

Upcoming releases worth marking on your calendar

Girls Like Girls arrives June 19, 2026, directed by Hayley Kiyoko and adapted from her best-selling novel of the same name, itself inspired by her 2015 single. The film follows Coley, a newcomer who spends a summer discovering love and figuring out who she is. Kiyoko built a devoted following long before the book existed, and the film version carries the same emotional directness that made the song resonate in the first place.

I Saw the TV Glow landed in 2024 with a cult following almost immediately. Directed by Jane Schoenbrun, it uses the framework of a fictional television series to explore identity, dissociation, and the trans experience in ways that feel genuinely unsettling. It is not a comfortable watch, and that is precisely the point.

Bottoms, from 2023, takes a sharper comedic angle. Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott play two queer high school students who launch a fight club as a scheme to get closer to their crushes. It is absurdist and gleefully self-aware.

Two 2025 releases round out the recent slate. The Parenting blends horror and comedy around a couple whose family introduction goes sideways during a haunted getaway. The Wedding Banquet reimagines the 1993 Ang Lee film for a new generation, following a gay couple who agree to fund their lesbian friends’ IVF in exchange for a green-card marriage.

The classics that built queer cinema

Moonlight remains the benchmark. Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film follows Chiron through three chapters of his life, each one quieter and more devastating than the last. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and changed the conversation about what a queer film could look like from a major studio.

Call Me By Your Name, released in 2017, captures first love with an ache that has made it a perennial favorite. Set across one Italian summer, it follows Elio and Oliver through an infatuation that neither fully understands while it is happening.

Paris Is Burning from 1990 is the essential document of New York’s drag ball culture, directed by Jennie Livingston. It centers the lives of queer and trans people of color at a moment of profound cultural transformation, and its influence can be traced through decades of fashion, music, and television that followed.

Milk, the 2008 biopic directed by Gus Van Sant, chronicles Harvey Milk’s rise as the first openly gay person elected to public office in California. Sean Penn’s performance anchors a film that is as much about political organizing as it is about identity.

Carol from 2015, directed by Todd Haynes, is a period romance set in 1950s New York. The story of Therese and Carol unfolds with restraint and precision, and Cate Blanchett’s performance gives the film a gravity that has kept it in circulation ever since.

Modern films that expanded the conversation

Tangerine, released in 2015 and shot entirely on an iPhone 5S by Sean Baker, follows Sin-Dee Rella, a trans sex worker tearing through Los Angeles on Christmas Eve to confront the man who cheated on her. It is kinetic, funny, and completely alive.

Love, Simon arrived in 2018 as the first major studio release centered on a gay teenage romance. The film follows Simon as he navigates coming out while trying to keep his identity private online. Its mainstream accessibility was the point, and it opened a door for the films that came after it.

Disclosure, the 2020 documentary directed by Laverne Cox and Sam Feder, examines how transgender people have been portrayed in Hollywood across nearly a century of film and television. It is both a history lesson and a critique, and it is essential viewing for anyone who cares about representation beyond the surface level.

Why it keeps mattering

Queer cinema is not a niche category waiting to graduate into something broader. It is its own tradition, with its own history and its own ongoing arguments about what these stories should look like and who gets to tell them. The films above make that case more clearly than any introduction could.

Girls Like Girls opens June 19.