Pride month may be over, but that’s no reason to stop celebrating the stories of LGBTQ+ people all year-round! We’re just past the halfway point for the year, making it a great time for reflection on the year so far. While this year hasn’t been great for LGBTQ folks (what year is?), there have been a lot of great movies and television shows by and for queer people. Some of it has felt truly groundbreaking, like Ncuti Gatwa’s gay Black hero on Doctor Who and Vera Drew’s bonkers, punk rock fair-use Batman parody The People’s Joker, giving audiences of all kinds new ways to see themselves represented. Let’s take a look at some of the best LGBTQ+ TV shows, movies, and performances of 2024 so far, and here’s to six more months of amazing queer entertainment!
The People’s Joker
It’s impossible to overstate the audacious inventiveness of The People’s Joker, the feature debut of writer/director/star Vera Drew. The film, in theaters on a road tour now, is an autobiographical story about Vera’s own transition, told through the colorful, twisted lens of Gotham City. As Joker the Harlequin, she tries to marry her desire to be a comedian, which is only for men, with her desire to live authentically as a woman, all while dating a super toxic trans man, Mistah J (Kane Distler). The People’s Joker mixes live action, a variety of different animation techniques, and a whole lot of low-budget creativity to bring Drew’s unique, hilarious, passionate vision to life. It rarely matches and is sometimes really strange to look at, but that only adds to the charm. Movies as fearless as The People’s Joker are truly rare, and it’s something every film fan should check out as soon as they can.
Drive Away Dolls
Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls is a raunchy lesbian road trip crime comedy that harkens back to some of his earliest work. While unrefined, Drive Away Dolls is a tremendous amount of fun in particular because of stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, who are comedic perfection as Jamie and Marian, a pair of friends who do a drive-away in order to get Marian to her aunt’s place in Florida. (A drive-away is when someone transports a vehicle from one place to another as a kind of trade for the vehicle’s usage, like a rental car without the rental!) The two very Queer but very different women end up in way over their heads when they discover illicit cargo in their trunk, roping them into more adventure than they really wanted. Drive Away Dolls is super funny with some great performances, and it’s explicitly, hilariously gay. It may not be what fans of Coen’s work with his brother might have expected, but Drive Away Dolls is a lovely little lesbian lark.
I Saw The TV Glow
Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, was a brilliantly crafted look into the dangers of being online as a teenage girl, invoking digital horrors alongside a kind of eerie nostalgia. Their sophomore effort, I Saw The TV Glow, is a heartbreaking, eerie look at how fandom and nostalgia can be both lifesaving and potentially dangerous. There isn’t just a “trans allegory” here but a full-on narrative about a character first grappling with her transness through the safety of fandom and fiction. The central characters (Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine) are young queer people who find solace in a sci-fi show called The Pink Opaque, but in time the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur, leading to the film’s creepiest moments. I Saw The TV Glow is best appreciated going in blind, hence my vagueness here, but it’s a truly devastating work of art that will leave its mark on you.
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books are definitely homoerotic, but the AMC television series takes things up several notches and makes the story as deliciously Queer as fans have always wanted it to be. The second season of the series, out now, follows the vampire Louis (Jacob Anderson) as he relates his history to dying journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), showing us his memories of early 20th century New Orleans and post-war Paris. More than Louis’ inhumanity, the show is focused on his extremely messy romances, first with his maker Lestat (Sam Reid) and then with the vampire Armand (Assad Zaman). These complicated and toxic love affairs are the stuff of romantic legend, the ships that launched a thousand fanfics, and the show fully commits. Fans of the novels and newcomers alike will find lots to love, because Interview with the Vampire is doing its own thing and deviates in its adaptation in ways that make it timelier and more compelling than the source material. It’s bloody, it’s sexy, and it’s very, very gay, just as it should be.
Love Lies Bleeding
English director Rose Glass really knows how to create a mood with her films, and Love Lies Bleeding is a sweaty, steroid-soaked lesbian crime thriller. It might be closer to what some fans imagined Drive Away Dolls might be, like the Coens’ later films, particularly No Country for Old Men. Kristen Stewart stars as Lou, who falls in love with Katy O’Brian’s Jackie, a bodybuilder who starts working out at Lou’s gym. Unfortunately, Lou has some complicated connections to organized crime and a need for revenge, and Jackie has a whole lot of anger, leading to a very bloody problem. Love Lies Bleeding is a surreal sapphic story that feels right at home among trailer park neo-noirs like Blue Ruin and Killer Joe, and it’s not just one of the best Queer movies this year, but one of the best movies, period.
We Are Lady Parts
On the television front, the Peacock series We Are Lady Parts premiered its second season, following an all-female Muslim punk rock band in the U.K. as they try to make it on the local music scene and balance tradition with their dreams. Created by Nida Manzoor, the series is heartfelt and hilarious with some truly killer music, and it’s especially refreshing because each of the women in the band Lady Parts is so different. There are no bad stereotypes here, just authentic portrayals of incredible young women. In season 2, the band’s drummer Ayesha (Juliette Motamed) found herself with a new girlfriend, even meeting her parents, only to be confronted with the fact that she wasn’t out to her own family. Instead of being relegated to a single special episode, her arc goes throughout the season and isn’t brushed away with any simple slogans or “born this way” positivity. It’s great to see different kinds of Queer perspectives being presented on TV, especially when they come from communities that haven’t been well represented on screen. We Are Lady Parts freaking rocks, and in a just world we’ll get at least a half-dozen seasons.
We’re Here
The Max documentary/reality series We’re Here returned for its fourth season with a brand new team of drag queens, and this time they’re facing some of their biggest challenges yet. The first three episodes follow Jaida Essence Hall, Priyanka, and Sasha Velour as they try to put on a drag show in Murfreesboro, TN, the town that famously banned drag and lost a lawsuit to the ACLU for that discrimination. The second trio of episodes follows Priyanka, Sasha, and Latrice Royale as they try to put on a drag show in rural Oklahoma, where they face similar challenges to Tennessee. In each town, the queens help people from all walks of life become their drag daughters and perform, and some of these performances are heartwarming tearjerkers. Watching a Christian father learn to relate to his Queer children and seeing a trans woman see her true self for the first time through the power of drag are just two of the highlights. We’re Here is the perfect watch for pride month, highlighting the creativity, beauty, resilience, and spirit of the whole LGBTQ community. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll definitely end up lip syncing along.
Quick Mentions
The Emmy-winning Hacks is back for season 3 and several characters on the series are gay or bisexual, though their romantic and sexual relationships weren’t heavily featured this season and we didn’t get another lesbian cruise episode, so it wasn’t as gay as previous seasons. Then again, one could argue that the season finale’s final scene was one of the queerest things the show’s ever done.
Ncuti Gatwa is the latest iteration of the doctor on Doctor Who, and since he’s a gay Black man, that’s riling some folks even more than when the doctor was a straight white woman. I’m not sure why people can wrap their minds around things like the dynamic proportions of the TARDIS or the idea of shapeshifting transdimensional beings but they can’t handle their heroes not looking like them, but here we are.
Last but not least, there’s the delightful coming-out romantic dramedy Am I OK?, which stars Dakota Johnson as a young woman awkwardly taking her first steps out of the closet and embracing her sexuality. Written by Lauren Pomerantz and directed by Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne, it’s a refreshingly authentic sapphic story that never feels forced.
