The queer films we deserve
and the ones we never asked for
Some queer films feel like gospel. Others like government pamphlets. One tells the truth even when it bruises you. The other explains you to people who never cared.
I’ve carried certain films with me the way some carry rosaries or old love letters. My Own Private Idaho wasn’t a movie. It was a mirror someone had dragged through the dirt. River, blinking into the dark. Narcoleptic and needful. Searching for a mother, a father, a fuck, a reason to stay awake. I watched it in a flat in Sydney, stoned and sad, with a Jewish boy who’d been kicked out of The Yeshiva College for kissing someone he shouldn’t. We didn’t speak for twenty minutes after it ended. There was nothing to say. It had said it for us.
Never before had a film made me want a sleep disorder. That longing to drop out mid-sentence. To collapse into unconsciousness because waking life was too full of hunger you couldn’t name. That film didn’t show desire. It showed need. The kind that haunts.
Years later, God’s Own Country. I watched it in bed with a Lebanese boy, a friend of my best friend, after he’d fucked me for three hours straight, pausing only to chain-smoke and spit the taste of ash into my mouth. I remember the sting of it. Not just the cigarette. The tenderness that came after. That film was like that too. Brutal, then soft. A story told through spit and silence. Nothing performative. No parade. Just two men learning to touch each other without armour. We lay there sticky, ruined, and I thought, yes, this is cinema.
Some films don’t feel like stories. They feel like confessions. Shortbus with its chorus of orgasms and grief. Totally Fucked Up with its handheld hopelessness and teenage queer rage. My Beautiful Laundrette with its layers of class and cock and confrontation, Omar and Johnny pressed against each other like fists that forgot they were fighting. These weren’t tales crafted for the mainstream. They were artefacts. Raw and radiant. I watched them in sharehouses and basements and one night in a bar that used to be a church. We cheered when two boys kissed. We cried when they didn’t.
And Moonlight. The diner scene. Hands almost touching. The eggs gone cold. It was all held in the tremble of a jaw, the tension of a glance. I watched it while living in Brighton, alone, and it still felt like being held. That film knew what many don’t. That queerness is often quiet. It happens in pauses. It speaks in what is not said.
Then there are the others. The films we were told to love. That were made for our parents, our straight coworkers, the school counsellor trying to understand why the gay kid cut class. Love, Simon. A story sanded down to sugar. Beautiful boys with upper-middle-class problems. A mother who listens. A teacher who jokes. A kiss on a ferris wheel. I watched it and felt nothing. Not because it wasn’t sweet. Because it wasn’t mine.
Or Stonewall. Not the riot. The rewrite. A cornfed twink throws the first brick while Sylvia and Marsha get shuffled to the sidelines. I turned it off. Not because it was offensive. Because it was empty.
The Birdcage, which I once adored, now grates like a laugh track over a wake. Robin Williams told to tone it down. Nathan Lane told to camp it up. A performance of gayness, not a being. It felt like drag without defiance.
Even Priscilla, which every queer in Australia is apparently contractually obligated to worship, reads differently now. The cis man playing a trans woman. The one-liners. The makeover montages. It’s a film built for the straight gaze. A costume party we were invited to, but never got to plan.
We deserve more.
We deserve films that let us be feral, fractured, flawed. That don’t end in a neat kiss under fireworks. That don’t resolve into acceptance. Because sometimes, we’re not accepted. Sometimes, we leave. Sometimes, we lie. Sometimes, we ruin everything and start again. I want those stories. Not to wallow in them, but to recognise myself.
I want queer films that let sex be sacred and sordid in the same scene. That don’t cut away when someone cries into a lover’s shoulder, or a stranger’s chest. I want the quiet devastation of watching someone walk away. The impossible joy of watching them come back. I want art that knows how it feels to have your name forgotten at the hospital desk. Or to fall in love on a tram with someone who will never call you back. I want complexity.
And I want us behind the camera. Not consulted. Not thanked. In control. Not a diversity clause. Not a post-screening panel. Give us the budget. Give us the final cut. We’ve earned it.
Because our stories are not accessories. They’re not pride-month playlists. They’re history. They’re holy. They’re how we keep each other alive.
If the industry won’t give us the films we deserve, then fuck it. We’ll make them ourselves. On cracked phones. In borrowed rooms. We’ll screen them in basements, on rooftops, behind clubs where we used to kiss strangers and call it survival. We’ll pass them around like bootlegs and psalms.
Let the others have their prestige. We have our prophets.
And they are not polite.
They are not safe.
They are not for everyone.
But they are ours.