Madison Hayes 
In the early 1990s, a wave of independent films by LGBTQ directors seemed to announce a new era of queer visibility on screen. The critic B. Ruby Rich gave that wave a name at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival, calling it New Queer Cinema, and the label stuck. But behind the celebration of defiance … Read more
Lesbian pulp fiction was a 1950s paperback phenomenon whose endings were dictated less by the writers than by a tangle of federal obscenity law, postal regulations, and editor demands. By the close of nearly every lesbian pulp novel, the queer character either died, descended into madness, or returned to a man. That punishing formula was … Read more
When I started mapping the evolution of coming-out stories in American film, I expected a tidy timeline. Instead, I found a century-long argument playing out on screen, with each generation rewriting what it meant for a queer character to exist, speak, or simply be. This guide traces that argument from the silent era to . … Read more
For years I rolled my eyes at the familiar whisper in online fan spaces: don’t get too attached to her, she’s queer. That quiet warning captured everything wrong with how lesbian, bisexual, and queer women characters get treated on screen. Dead Lesbian Syndrome (also widely called the Bury Your Gays trope) describes a stubborn pattern … Read more
Between 1981 and 1995, the AIDS epidemic killed more than 300,000 people in the United States alone. The queer community bore the brunt of that loss, and mainstream culture responded with silence, stigma, and cruelty. Government inaction turned a public health emergency into a massacre, and the grief it produced was almost too vast to … Read more
In 1977, a small group of friends gathered in a San Francisco living room to screen Super-8 films by and about LGBTQ people. That intimate gathering became Frameline, now the oldest, largest, and most widely recognized queer film festival in the world. The history of Frameline and America’s queer film festivals is a story of … Read more
On February 9, 1977, hundreds of film lovers crowded into a small Amsterdam cinema for the opening of what many scholars recognize as the world’s first official queer film festival. Within a decade, similar festivals had launched in San Francisco, New York, and London, each solving a problem the mainstream industry refused to acknowledge: where … Read more