Every Pride Month, you can read dozens of LGBTQ+ streaming guides recommending the same feature films that you’ve already seen before. And sure, we all love Carol, but with a wealth of queer cinema available in the world, some of the best work remains hidden.
Short films, especially, are often uncharted territory. But some of the boldest offerings in queer cinema exist in short form! This summer, instead of sweating through your shirt in the sweltering heat, why not stay indoors and treat yourself to a short film festival of your very own?
There are plenty of new shorts on the circuit right now that I'm excited for everyone to see. Take Natalie Shirinian's Parev Mama, currently available on demand, which follows an Armenian American queer woman (played by the filmmaker herself) navigating a rough conversation with her mother after a date with her girlfriend. In a similar vein, Shuli Huang's Queer Palm winner Will You Look at Me, finds the young Chinese filmmaker exploring his relationship with his own mother through a visual personal essay. Maybe George Pedrosa's Macho Carne — an experimental Brazilian short that embraces blood, sweat, tears, and cum — is more your speed. Or you might be intrigued by Michael Portnoy's Progressive Touch, which features three unique set pieces that blend sex and choreography to create engrossing dances that are as funny as they are erotic.
But while we wait for some of this most recent work to hit streamers, there are more queer shorts to watch than you can imagine. You don’t even need to worry about trying to hunt them down yourself because I’ve curated a special little collection, all of them readily available for viewing right now. By no means is the below a comprehensive collection of LGBTQ+ short films, so think of it instead as a fun tour through the past and present of onscreen queerness, featuring a mix of important voices and new talents.
The films on this list range from the experimental to the erotic, the fantastic to the historic, but most importantly, they highlight how weird and wonderful queer cinema has been for decades, no matter the runtime.
There is no better place to start this journey through short queer cinema than with the only film that writer Jean Genet ever directed: Un Chant d’Amour. Though his work has been adapted to great effect by a number of filmmakers (e.g. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle), there’s something irresistible about how boldly and shamelessly the film presents its homosexual eroticism and how distinctly Genet’s vision shines through. Seventy years ago, a court condemned the film as “cheap pornography calculated to promote homosexuality, perversion and morbid sex practices,” and boy, is it a shame that we’re still having the same conversations today about far less explicit material.
Let’s fast-forward to the '60s, when experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger brought his fetish for masculinity to life with plenty of color and a hell of a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack. Who among us isn’t fascinated by the twin visages of Marlon Brando and Jesus Christ? Who is immune to the simple thrill of watching a drag race (not RuPaul’s) or witnessing men getting dressed? In Scorpio Rising, however, Anger pivots away from mere eroticism, instead creating something closer to an assault of imagery, appropriating everything from films like The Wild One to Nazi symbolism, in order to create something that feels as celebratory in its queerness as it does angry and violent.
Barbara Hammer’s seminal short Dyketactics is one of her best known, and an ideal introduction to the legendary lesbian filmmaker. At only four minutes, it’s a lovingly sensual tribute to femininity, cutting together and sometimes even layering images of lesbian pleasure from start to finish. It’s a simple but effective example of what LGBTQ+ representation can be: unfiltered images of queer people placed directly on the screen.
Alright, I’m cheating a little bit here by including three shorts as one, but this trilogy by Terence Davies (whose latest excellent feature Benediction is in theaters right now) deserves to be seen in full. Many have criticized Davies’ views on his own queerness as being rather bleak over the years. (The filmmaker famously said that “being gay” had “ruined [his] life,” due to the homophobia he faced growing up.) But there’s haunting beauty in the way he depicts misery, with this series serving as something of “an alternate-reality autobiography,” as author and film critic Michael Koresky puts it. These shorts follow the life of a closeted gay man split into three pieces: his tortured youth (Children), his unsatisfying adulthood (Madonna and Child), and his own mortality (Death and Transfiguration).
Queer biography is often limited to the most sanitized images possible, but certain filmmakers manage to stand out out by taking unique approaches to the lives and stories of iconic figures. Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston is one such work, interspersing footage of the real Hughes with gorgeously designed black-and-white fantasies and recreations of Harlem. It’s a starkly political film about Blackness and queerness, one that reclaims Hughes’ work in the name of those who identify with it most, creating a dreamlike world that needs no narrative other than providing the viewer with pure visual poetry.
As with much queer cinema, Yann Gonzalez’s Islands is about desire. Playing with the structure of La Ronde, Gonzalez creates a world that’s deceptively romantic by teasing the viewer at first. The largely plotless short moves from amusing to horrific to tender to erotic in no time at all, pairing together all kinds of people in sensual situations. As explicit as the film is, showing sex on stage and cruising in the park, the camera presents it all with nothing but the utmost tenderness.
There shouldn’t be something revolutionary about seeing trans people existing on screen, whether it’s watching them kiss or shave or hang out at the beach. And, yet, a film like A Trans With a Movie Camera feels radical simply because of how scant such cinematic offerings are. Billed as “a cine-essay” and explicitly citing and playing off of Dziga Vertov’s silent classic Man with a Movie Camera, Arpaia offers an experimental and poetic glimpse into the beauty and rage of being trans.
Yes, Terror, Sisters! is silly and dumb and occasionally cringe, but isn’t that what being queer and extremely online is all about? Langlois’ short is such a delightful time because of how deftly it navigates the humor and flat-out anger of being trans in a cis world. Though grounded in a cafe where four trans women voice their frustrations with the world, the short leaves reality to dive into each woman’s fantasy about how she would deal with cisnormative society. Terror, Sisters! rages against everything from expectations of passability to being forced to sit through “trans films” created by and starring cis people who perform vague approximations of us. Reclamation is hard and messy, but at least it can also be a great time.
If many of the shorts presented on this list are about desire in an explicit manner, Trade Center is something of a challenge to that framework: how does one convey the appeal of a queer space that no longer exists for those who were never there? Pairing together audio testimonials from gay men who cruised within the bathrooms and staircases of the World Trade Center prior to 9/11 with an assemblage of video showing its contemporary rebuilding, Baran creates a moving portrait of a time and space that are no longer directly accessible to its audience.
Closing out the list is a personal favorite, a film that shows how we process our identities through the art we consume and the meaning we project onto it. Andrew Ondrejcak’s The Actress stars Isabel Sandoval (a fantastic filmmaker herself, whose latest short Shangri-La should also be watched) as she becomes a number of iconic film characters in recreations of scenes from films, from Barbarella to The Tree of Life. It’s a short that lovingly reimagines what cinema could look like with a trans lead while diving into just how queer film history has always been, whether or not others have seen it.
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