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30 Essential LGBTQ+ Comedies

Queer culture is so many vibrant and beautiful and rambunctious things, but often times when you’re wading through the history of queer cinema it can feel like a community defined by tragedy and unhappy endings. And while there is much to learn from and much to love about the many heavy gay dramas out there, we must also take time to celebrate and revel in the bright side of difference, which is why this list is all about the comedies. There is plenty of tenderness among these films to be sure, but there’s also Robin Williams doing a macho drag impersonation of John Wayne in The Birdcage and a pair of dirtbag girls just trying to scrape up enough cash for a beach trip in Never Goin’ Back.

From the lo-fi beginnings of John Waters to New Queer Cinema to the present day wave of queer coming-of-age movies popping up on Netflix, queer comedy has gone from the underground to the mainstream. The pioneering work of stars like Divine and filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar paved the way for a family-friendly lesbian Cyrano de Bergerac in The Half of It and a three-way battle of tops in an Academy Award darling like the acid-laced The Favourite. But even though queer culture has reached a much broader level of awareness than when The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert came out, its sharp-edged activist spirit still lives loud in directors like Greg Araki (Kaboom) and Darren Stein (G.B.F.). The fight for equal rights may go on ad infinitum, but so too will the laughter, the drag, and the happy-cry love stories.

Here are our 30 essential LGBTQ+ comedy movies, in order of release.  – Jordan Crucchiola