Movies that expand the evolution of LGBTQ+ representation in film

When representation meets intersectionality as audiences and cultural writers turn their gazes to the past, we find ourselves engaged in conversations about works that focus on the notion that a particular film couldn't be made today as it was decades before. Greenlighting projects comes with an understanding that how characters are seen and recognized matters, which challenges a long-established status quo that has benefitted certain performers (and forced others to remain invisible, even in the telling of their own narratives).

We have set a standard — stretching all the way back to the earliest days of live theater (let's just posit it, for the sake of this conversation, to the Shakespearean age) — that allowed white men to play all roles: male, female, people of color, different sexual identities. The cultural norms of this period informed and maintained an ongoing system of not only deliberate erasure, but a celebration of one group's (cis white men) portrayal of others as the privileged end goal.