10 Queer Movies on Tubi Worth Knowing for LGBTQ+ History Month
Queer film history is bigger than one genre, one identity, or one generation, and these 10 movies prove it.
Queer cinema has range. Like, range range.
The stories LGBTQ+ audiences once had to search the margins for have spent decades claiming more room onscreen, building a film history that's constantly evolving alongside the community itself. Look back far enough and you can see what filmmakers were allowed to say, what they had to code between the lines, and how much has changed as more queer storytellers gained the space to speak for themselves.
Of course, “queer cinema” has never meant one thing. The LGBTQ+ community isn't a monolith, so why would its movies be? Different generations have recognized themselves onscreen in completely different ways, while certain films became the ones people passed around, quoted, reclaimed, debated, or lovingly inducted into the queer canon.
LGBTQ+ History Month feels like a pretty good time to press play on some of them. Tubi's LGBTQ+ Storytelling collection gives us plenty of history to explore, so we're looking at 10 movies that each hold a different place in the larger conversation.
Your queer film syllabus just got longer.
But I'm a Cheerleader
Megan is a cheerleader. She has a boyfriend. She wears skirts. Case closed, right?
Her family and friends disagree in But I'm a Cheerleader, sending Megan to a conversion-therapy program where the attempt to convince her she's straight runs into one fairly substantial complication: Clea DuVall's Graham.
Jamie Babbit turns compulsory heterosexuality into a candy-colored nightmare of aggressively gendered pinks and blues, while Natasha Lyonne gives Megan an earnestness that makes her gradual self-discovery sweeter than the absurdity surrounding it. The movie has grown into a queer cult favorite precisely because it gets to be romantic, political, satirical, and extremely camp at the same time. Sometimes finding yourself involves realizing everyone else's version of you has terrible production design.
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Maurice
Long before yearning became a viral sensation, Maurice was putting it to work.
Edwardian England doesn't leave Maurice Hall much room to explore who he loves without considering what it could cost him. James Ivory's adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel follows Maurice through relationships with men, repression, heartbreak, and the possibility of building a life outside the one society has prescribed for him. James Wilby leads the film alongside Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves.
The restrictions belong to another era. The emotional calculation doesn't. Wanting somebody while wondering what that desire could cost you is a thread queer cinema has returned to again and again. The corsets may change. The yearning remains undefeated.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
The Children's Hour
Not every landmark in queer film history is comfortable to revisit.
A lie becomes devastatingly powerful in The Children's Hour, where Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine portray Karen and Martha, two teachers whose lives are devastated after a student spreads a rumor that they're romantically involved. Released in 1961, the movie arrived during an era when Hollywood operated under severe restrictions around depicting homosexuality, and its treatment of Martha reflects the painful limitations surrounding queer characters onscreen at the time.
Its place here isn't about pretending those limitations aged well. LGBTQ+ film history isn't a straight line from bad representation to good representation, and understanding where cinema has been helps make the distance traveled more visible. Watch it as a product of its era. Then be very glad queer storytelling didn't stop there.
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Carol
A glance across a department store counter. A forgotten pair of gloves. Several metric tons of yearning.
Aspiring photographer Therese meets the elegant Carol Aird across that department-store counter in Carol, and attraction starts growing inside a 1950s world determined to limit what either woman can do about it.
Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara make restraint part of the romance. Looks linger. Touches matter. Conversations carry entire second conversations underneath them. Todd Haynes understands that when two women aren't given much room to say exactly what they want, everything else has to get louder. Queer cinema said yearning. Carol said understood.
We also included Carol in our guide to the best romance movies on Tubi, because apparently one watchlist wasn't enough room for all that eye contact.
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Tangerine
Christmas Eve in Los Angeles is about to become everybody's business.
After learning that her boyfriend and pimp has been cheating on her, Sin-Dee Rella heads across the city looking for answers in Tangerine, with her best friend Alexandra getting pulled into the increasingly chaotic mission.
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor give the movie its pulse as two trans women whose friendship gets to be funny, argumentative, loyal, exhausting, and deeply affectionate. Sean Baker famously shot the film largely on modified iPhones, turning a production limitation into part of the independent movie's visual identity. Its place in queer cinema goes beyond putting trans women at the center of the frame. Sin-Dee and Alexandra are allowed to be messy, hilarious, angry, loving, and fully human without being asked to represent every trans experience at once. As they should.
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The Inspection
Ellis French enters the Marines looking for somewhere to belong. Belonging comes with conditions.
Inspired by writer-director Elegance Bratton's own experiences, The Inspection follows a young gay Black man who joins the military after experiencing homelessness and rejection from his mother. The institution offers structure and possibility while also confronting Ellis with homophobia and rigid expectations around masculinity.
Jeremy Pope keeps Ellis vulnerable without making vulnerability the opposite of strength. His character's queerness, Blackness, relationship with his mother, and desire for acceptance don't exist in separate boxes; they shape the same person trying to determine whether belonging somewhere requires surrendering pieces of himself.
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I Wish You All the Best
Coming out is supposed to be the beginning of living more honestly. Nobody promised everyone around you would immediately know how to handle it.
For Ben, coming out as nonbinary upends home before opening the possibility of building something new. I Wish You All the Best follows the teenager after they're forced to leave home, reconnect with an estranged sister, enter a new school, build friendships, and figure out what life can look like when the people around them begin making room for who they actually are.
Putting a nonbinary teenager at the center also gives our History Month timeline something earlier generations of queer cinema rarely had the language or freedom to offer. Representation keeps evolving because the conversation does too. There should always be room for another story.
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The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Three performers. One bus. An Australian desert. Enough fabulousness to survive all three.
Priscilla is the bus. Tick, Adam, and Bernadette are the passengers making sure nobody forgets the name. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sends the two drag performers and transgender performer Bernadette across Australia toward a casino residency, with Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp piling costumes, comedy, friendship, and conflict onto the journey.
By the '90s, the road trip had become a queer cult touchstone, carrying drag culture further into mainstream international cinema while serving looks that have refused to age quietly. Some aspects reflect the language and attitudes of the era in which it was made, but its celebration of performance, friendship, and chosen family remains central to its legacy.
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And Then We Danced
Dance already requires control. Falling for your rival is less cooperative.
Set within the world of traditional Georgian dance, And Then We Danced follows Merab, a dedicated young performer whose ambitions become complicated when Irakli joins his company. Competition gradually gives way to attraction, forcing Merab to confront feelings that don't fit comfortably inside the rigid ideas of masculinity surrounding him.
Levan Akin's film gives us a queer story rooted specifically in Georgian culture, where dance becomes both an expression of national tradition and a space where Merab begins questioning the expectations placed on his body and identity. Queerness doesn't exist within one cultural experience. Neither does the courage required to claim it.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
God's Own Country
Rural Yorkshire isn't exactly making Johnny Saxby's emotional life easier.
Farm work, heavy drinking, and casual encounters have become Johnny's routine when Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe arrives to help during lambing season. Josh O'Connor gives the young farmer at the center of God's Own Country a guardedness that makes the intimacy developing between the two men feel genuinely disruptive.
Rather than treating Johnny's sexuality as the revelation, director Francis Lee makes vulnerability the harder hurdle. Allowing another person to actually know him requires a different kind of courage, while Gheorghe's experience as a migrant adds another layer to two men negotiating belonging from very different positions.
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