Queer representation in film has greatly improved in the past 40 years—according to GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index’s 2023 report, 28.5 percent of films included an LGBTQ+ character. But it has taken decades to get there. In the 1990s, there was a notable burst of new directing talent who wanted to boost an underrepresented group and created the New Queer Cinema. Here is a look at five of the movement’s most instrumental filmmakers, and the works that propelled them.
Todd Haynes
Now one of the most critically acclaimed directors working, with modern classics such as “Carol” and “Far from Heaven,” Haynes started bold and never really looked back. His queer sensibility is present in his magnificent, moving 1987 Barbie doll–opus “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.” The film was long held from public view due to legalities, but it’s worth finding and watching on YouTube. However, it was the 1991 Sundance sensation “Poison” that cemented his arrival. A triptych using elements of horror and sci-fi and based on stories by Jean Genet, the film is brash, controversial, and in your face, but contains the requisite care that has shepherded Haynes’ career through to 2023’s “May December.” (Look closely for John Leguizamo in the prison sequence in “Poison,” credited as “Damien Garcia.”)
Rose Troche
Frustrated by a lack of visual representation of lesbian culture onscreen, Troche and her writing partner, Guinevere Turner, created 1994’s “Go Fish,” a charming black-and-white paean to WLW that reportedly cost a shocking $15,000 to make. That small pittance paid dividends, however, as the marketability of lesbian audiences was finally proven thanks to the movie’s strong art house showing.
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Filmmakers like Troche paved the way for filmmakers like Dunye, the first out Black woman to direct a mainstream feature film. “The Watermelon Woman,” released in 1996, is no doubt one of the films that enjoyed the reverb glow of “Go Fish.” The ambitious project, which follows a smitten video store clerk (Dunye) as she doggedly pursues information about a little-known Hollywood Golden Age Black female actor, is now considered a landmark indie film. It not only unapologetically focuses on queer women of color, but deals in themes of erasure in Hollywood and how it seeps through generations.
Gregg Araki
Araki is to punk cinema what the Sex Pistols were to punk music. He exploded onto the indie scene with his gritty, outlandish 1992 film “The Living End,” an L.A.-set dramedy about two gay, HIV-positive men who embark on a self-destructive road trip after one kills a homophobic police officer. Caustic and canny, the film impressed many with its embrace of counterculture in an era when it was disappearing. Thankfully, Araki never lost his respect for nonconformists: Even with elevated budgets would come films like “Nowhere,” a bohemian black comedy; “Mysterious Skin,” about childhood trauma and UFOs, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt; and “Smiley Face,” starring Anna Faris as a stoner actor.
Gus Van Sant
The most publicly regarded figure on this list and the only to ever receive a Best Director Academy Award nomination (twice, actually, for 1997’s “Good Will Hunting” and 2008’s “Milk”), Van Sant may have entered more mainstream conversations, but his roots are solidly in the New Queer Cinema movement. His 1988 movie “Mala Noche” focuses on male desire in his beloved Portland, but his 1991 masterpiece “My Own Private Idaho” is quite possibly the apex of this era. A true rulebreaker, casting in queer roles two hugely successful actors near the peak of their young stardom (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), the film follows no set movie conventions or audience-pleasing tactics. It broke some brains more than 30 years ago, but time has been kind to this tender, elliptical look at struggling Oregonian hustlers. The film is now a touchstone for many enterprising filmmakers, queer and otherwise.