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LGBTQ
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'The View's Joy Behar Vows To Have A Lesbian Experience After Being Grilled By Guest Sandra Bernhard: "Some Day I Will"
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Alan Cumming Admits Peppermint's Early Banishment From 'The Traitors' "Was Not A Good Look": "The First Person To Go Out Is A Trans Person Of Color"
Pride Month is about so much more than parades and parties and three seasons of different Drag Race series all overlapping. Yes, all that is fun, but it’s important that every member of the community (and everyone outside the community, too) learn about the history. Gay pride didn’t start with Stonewall, and Stonewall was far from the queer community’s first clash with police. Trans people existed onscreen way before Orange Is the New Black. Ellen DeGeneres coming out on TV was definitely a moment, but she was far from the first gay person or gay character on TV. The LGBTQ+ experience comes with a whole lot of beautiful, painful, fascinating, tragic, and essential history—even if textbooks and classrooms try to ignore it.
Thankfully we all have streaming services to go where high school history classes won’t (or potentially can’t, he wrote while glaring at Republicans in Tennessee). The past couple years have seen a number of incredibly important documentaries and docuseries debut across, well, nearly every streaming service. Seriously—if you want to launch a new streaming service nowadays, it needs to come equipped with a queer history doc. This is the greatest blessing of the streaming age, though, because queer history has been relegated to out of print books and hard to find films for way too long. Now so much queer history—from Bayard Rustin and the Compton Cafeteria Riots to Sandra Caldwell and Raymond Burr—is just a scroll and click away.
Below you’ll find a guide to the essential LGBTQ+ history docs that you simply have to stream this month.
'Circus of Books' (Netflix)
Queer history can be found everywhere, even in places you may not expect. For instance, Circus of Books in West Hollywood—a locally-owned bookstore that went from a gay cruising site to a popular purveyor and haven for LA’s queer community in the ’80s and into the 2010s. This documentary examines the larger cultural importance of queer expression while also zeroing in on the very real—and very familiar—story of the family who owned the keys to this gay kingdom.
'Disclosure' (Netflix)
Trans people have always existed, since the dawn of time and definitely since the dawn of moving pictures. But just because the trans community has always been visible doesn’t mean they’ve been respected (see: Ace Ventura, Mrs. Doubtfire, dozens of other films, too many ’90s talk show episodes, and every pretty much police procedural and sitcom). The amount of talent on board to talk about these issues is staggering: Laverne Cox, Chaz Bono, Lilly Wachowski, Mj Rodriguez, Candis Cayne, Alexandra Billings, Trace Lysette, Jen Richards, Jamie Clayton, Zeke Smith—and that’s just the start. Director Sam Feder’s meticulous dissection of how pop culture has depicted and impacted the trans community over the past 100 years is a must watch.
'A Secret Love' (Netflix)
One of the biggest misconceptions about LGBTQ+ history is that it began with Stonewall, as if queer people never truly lived until that specific incident kickstarted a more public version of queer liberation. But what docs like A Secret Love confirm and celebrate is the real truth: we existed and lived and loved before the riots. This sweeping romance follows two women who fell in love on the fields of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (y’know, A League of Their Own!) but felt compelled to keep their relationship vague to those around them for 70 years. Ultimately, though, this piece of history is much more heartwarming than heartbreaking.
'Howard' (Disney+)
The contributions that gay people have made to society have long been kept in the closet, due to either the shame of the straights in charge or the justified self-preservation felt by said gays. Disney+’s original doc Howard sets the record straight on the gay man behind Disney’s magical era: his name was Howard Ashman, and he co-wrote the songs that powered The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin before dying of heart failure due to HIV/AIDS. This look at Ashman’s life and impact is necessary viewing for the entire family, especially the brilliant gay kids in your life who need a hero like Howard.
'Equal' (HBO Max)
Continuing on the “queer liberation didn’t start with Stonewall” front, here’s HBO Max’s original docuseries Equal. This four-part production highlights some of the forgotten heroes of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement, mixing archival footage with gripping reenactments to bring history to life for a 21st century audience. Narrated by Billy Porter, Equal’s cast includes Samira Wiley as Lorraine Hansberry, Jamie Clayton as Christine Jorgensen, Keiynan Lonsdale as Bayard Rustin, Anthony Rapp as Harry Hay, and Isis King as one of the trans women who fought in the 1966 Compton Cafeteria riots.
'The Lady and the Dale' (HBO)
We love our queer heroes, but we also gotta pay respect to the real life queer antiheroes who scammed the system keeping them down. Elizabeth Carmichael was a bail-jumping, marriage-deserting counterfeiter and fraudster who used the 1970s gas shortage to promote a three-wheeled car—The Dale—to the world. This four-part docuseries digs into what it meant to be a public figure and trans in the 1970s and so, so, so much more.
'Pride' (FX on Hulu)
If you’re looking for a companion piece to HBO Max’s Equal, one that goes further and deeper than that series’ running time allowed, then you have to binge FX’s Pride. The six episodes each cover a respective decade of revolution, from the secret parties and respectability protests of the 1950s to the fight for trans rights in the 21st century. This series is truly a crash course in queer political history, touching on the bigotry of Anita Bryant, the hope and disappointment of the Clinton presidency, the trans men who shined in NYC’s ballroom scene, and so much more.
'Visible: Out on Television' (Apple TV+)
Whereas Pride takes viewers on a journey through the history of queer civil rights and Disclosure focuses on the depiction of trans lives onscreen, Apple TV+’s Visible: Out on Television exists in the overlap and uses its expanded running time (5 hourlong episodes) to trace the evolution of queer depiction and involvement in television. The series features a diverse lineup of narrators, including Janet Mock and Asia Kate Dillon, and a who’s who of LGBTQ+ television icons. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Tim Gunn learn that Raymond Burr—Perry Mason himself—was a homosexual. The series includes so much unearthed footage from 1950s and 1960s talk shows that really capture how hostile the world was at the time, and sadly don’t feel a far cry from the blatant gay panic seen in 1980s talk shows like Oprah.
'P.S. Burn This Letter Please' (Discovery+)
If you signed up for Discovery+ to watch episodes of Property Brothers: Forever Home, then you have access to one of the most fascinating and illuminating docs on this list. The premise of P.S. Burn This Letter Please is simple: the filmmakers uncovered a box of letters from the 1950s addressed to “Reno”—and all of Reno’s friends were drag queens in New York City. In the 1950s. This doc shares all those letters, peeks into what it was like to be gay in the ’50s. It also goes a step further and tracks down the queens who are still alive today, and still pretty damn fabulous in their 80s and 90s. Considering that the AIDS crisis took an entire generation of people who would be queer mentors today, it’s so beautiful to see so many gay and trans people born in the 1920s and 1930s alive and telling their stories on film. This is a can’t miss film (and y’know, Discovery+ has a 7-day free trial!).
