Cinema - some of our favorite LGBTQ+ movies available to watch at home through UCLA Library Collections
- Naz & Malik - Naz and Maalik are friends, classmates, business partners and lovers. As the two closeted Muslim teens go about their regular daily routine on a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn, they arouse the suspicions of an undercover FBI agent who begins to track them.
- The Miseducation of Cameron Post - Based on Emily M. Danforth's celebrated novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post follows the titular character (Chloe Grace Moretz) as she is sent to a gay conversion therapy center after getting caught with another girl in the back seat of a car on prom night.
- The Watermelon Woman - A video store clerk and fledgling filmmaker becomes obsessed a character she sees in a 1930s movie. Determined to find out who the actress she knows only as the "Watermelon Woman" was and make her the subject of a documentary, she starts researching and is surprised to discover that not only was Fae Richards a fellow Philadelphian but also a lesbian.
- The Way He Looks - Leo is a blind teenager who's fed up with his overprotective mother and the bullies at school. Looking to assert his independence, he decides to study abroad. When Gabriel, the new kid in town, teams with Leo on a school project, new feelings blossom in him that make him reconsider his plans.
- Pelo Malo - A nine-year-old boy's preening obsession with straightening his hair elicits a tidal wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother. Junior doesn't know yet what it means to be gay, but the very notion prompts Marta to "correct" Junior's condition before it fully takes hold.
- Beats Per Minute - In Paris in the early 1990s, members of the activist group ACT UP battle for those stricken with HIV/AIDS, taking on sluggish government agencies and major pharmaceutical companies.
- Moonlight - A moving and transcendent look at three defining chapters in the life of Chiron, a young man growing up in Miami. Following his epic journey to adulthood, as a shy outsider dealing with difficult circumstances, Chiron is guided by support, empathy and love from the most unexpected places.
- Mosquita y Mari - This exquisitely crafted coming of age tale follows a pair of Latina teens who fall gradually in love against the backdrop of Southeast Los Angeles.
- Rafiki - Despite a political rivalry between their families, Kena and Ziki remain close friends, supporting each other to pursue their dreams in a conservative society. When love blossoms between them, the two girls are forced to choose between happiness and safety.
- Tom of Finland - The proudly erotic drawings of artist Touko Laaksonen, known to the world as Tom of Finland, shaped the fantasies of a generation of gay men, influencing art and fashion before crossing over into the wider cultural consciousness. But who was the man behind the leather?
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Marianne is hired to paint the wedding portrait of Heloise. As the women orbit each other, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Heloise's first moments of freedom.
Highlight - Tangerine (2015)
Todd Wiener, the UCLA Film and Television Archive motion picture curator, recommends “Tangerine.”
Shot on a shoestring budget with iPhones, “Tangerine” exuberantly focuses on the madcap Christmas Eve events of two best friends from L.A.’s African American and Latinx transgender community. Actresses Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor were discovered by director Sean Baker near the film’s central Donut Time location at the corner of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. These two leads tear up the Hollywood scenery with performances as blazingly fierce as they are tender. Under Baker’s empathetic direction, the tale of these two sex worker trans women effortlessly walks a fine line between disarming humor and pathos. Beloved by many critics and lauded at numerous film festivals, this engaging film more importantly provided trans people of color a much-needed cinematic platform.
Documentary - Historical and contemporary stories you can access from home through UCLA Library Collections
- We Were Here - An intimate, yet epic history of the AIDS years in San Francisco, as told through the stories of five longtime San Franciscans.
- Stonewall Uprising - In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. That night, the street erupted into violent protests and demonstrations that lasted for six days.
- Out in the Night - Under the neon lights in a gay-friendly neighborhood of New York City, four young African-American lesbians are violently and sexually threatened by a man on the street. They defend themselves and are charged and convicted in the courts and in the media as a 'Gang of Killer Lesbians.'
- Kumu Hina - During a momentous year in her life in modern Honolulu, Hina Wong-Kalu, a native Hawaiian transgender teacher uses traditional culture to inspire a student to claim her place as leader of the school's all-male hula troupe.
- Brother Outsider - One of the first "freedom riders," an adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. Philip Randolph, organizer of the march on Washington, and intelligent, gregarious and charismatic, Bayard Rustin was denied his place in the limelight for one reason - he was gay.
- Call Her Ganda - When Jennifer Laude, a Filipina transwoman, is brutally murdered by a U.S. Marine, three women intimately invested in the case; an activist attorney, a transgender journalist, and Jennifer's mother, galvanize a political uprising, pursuing justice and taking on hardened histories of U.S. imperialism.
- After Stonewall - In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city's gay community. With this outpouring of courage and unity, the Gay Liberation Movement had begun.
- Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria - The story of the first known act of collective, violent resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States - a 1966 riot in San Francisco's impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood.
- The Revival: Black Lesbian Poets and Feminist Thinkers - The US tour of a group of Black lesbian poets and musicians, who become present-day stewards of a historical movement to build community among queer women of color.
- Wildness - A resonant portrait of the Silver Platter, a Latino Los Angeles LGBT bar, which integrates elements of fiction and documentary structures to vividly portray a multi-layered relationship with the bar.
- History Lessons - Barbara Hammer traces lesbian history by presenting an extraordinary array of archival footage - and then playfully manipulates it to make it seem as though lesbians were everywhere.
- Before Stonewall - This documentary pries open the closet door, setting free the dramatic story of the public and private existences experienced by gay and lesbian Americans since the 1920s.
- The Right Girls- A documentary film that follows three young transgender women who trek across Mexico as part of the high-profile migrant caravan of 2018, teaming up in southern Mexico with the goal of reaching the U.S. border.
Highlight - Paris is Burning (1990)
The dreams and aspirations of the Black and Latino protagonists are affectionately portrayed by a nonjudgmental lens that also frankly represents the realities of their societal repression. In spite of the socio-political barriers, there is a bittersweet hopefulness to this film that is very much symptomatic of what the trans community continues to face many decades later. The UCLA Film & Television Archive staff worked extensively with Criterion on this project.
Read more about this collaboration here
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- Art21 Pride Unveiled - Breaking free from the expectations of the binary, artists abstract traditional definitions of gender and sexuality to provide visibility to LGBTQ communities and liberated perspectives underrepresented in the mainstream.
- In the Life - The producers of In the Life, television’s longest running LGBTQ news magazine, approached the UCLA Film & Television Archive in 2012 with an exciting opportunity: to become the caretakers of In the Life’s 20-year collection of irreplaceable, historic and meaningful materials, and make those materials available online for free to students, researchers and the general public.
- Outfest UCLA Legacy Project - Bringing together the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Outfest, this collaborative effort works to collect, preserve and showcase LGBTQ moving image media.
Dive Deeper with the LGBTQ Film and Television Research Guide
Check out additional video streaming resources, available ebooks on queer representation in media, and more!